A Guide to 2025 in Antisemitism: The 90 Most Important Articles I Wrote Last Year
Here's a month-by-month collection of my key pieces for The Algemeiner, RealClearInvestigations, and here on Substack.
Consider this a free course in what I learned last year on how antisemitism looks around the world now a quarter of the way into the 21st century: humanity has regressed.
Consider this a free ebook. Yes — I know, it’s absurdly long. Yes, I know that I could break it up into many points. But that’s not the point.
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE OVERWHELMING. I WANT YOU TO BE OVERWHELMED. FEEL WHAT I FEEL EVERY DAY.
That is the point.
Friends, I’m overwhelmed.
This was my third year of writing and editing about antisemitism every day, on a full-time basis. And it’s all been way too much.
I present to you this sampling here of what seems to me the most important of what I wrote, primarily for The Algemeiner, but also with my RealClearInvestigations pieces, and several key Substack essays also. There are also two video interviews of me buried in there too.
For the articles I have excerpted some key chunks, usually—but not always—from the beginning. Click the image of the headline in order to access the full, original article.
I had originally planned on some epic conclusion and analysis about all this but for now just assembling the collection was more than enough. So it’s just the articles with excerpts, images, and videos, presented chronologically. We’ll save the conclusion for a follow-up piece.
For now, please just dive in and see what all you may have missed about last year’s many currents of rising hate around the globe:
WINTER
January
There was a staggering 340 percent increase in total antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022, according to newly unveiled research from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Announced on Monday, the new report presented by the two groups to Israeli President Isaac Herzog also showed that antisemitic incidents skyrocketed globally last year by nearly 100 percent compared to 2023.
Researchers chose to analyze data starting in 2022 in order to assess a year without a major event inflaming antisemitism, namely the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The report documented similar levels of antisemitic incidents growing in both North America and Europe last year. The United States saw an increase of 288 percent over the totals of 2022, while antisemitic atrocities in Canada rose by 562 percent. Meanwhile, incidents in France surged by over 350 percent, and the United Kingdom experienced a spike of 450 percent, with nearly 2,000 acts of antisemitism in the first half of 2024 alone.
Law enforcement in Australia has started an investigation into the origins behind a spree of recent antisemitic crimes, announcing they suspect individuals outside the country have coordinated the campaign of hate.
On Wednesday, Australia Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw said his department believes that “criminals-for-hire may be behind some incidents” and that they have begun investigating “who is paying those criminals, where those people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is.”
Police have identified six attacks in Sydney alone since November 2024, including cars set on fire accompanied with anti-Israel graffiti and synagogues vandalized with swastikas. In Melbourne, arson attacks also targeted Jewish politician Josh Burns’ office in June and the Adass synagogue in December.
A December report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) said that the country’s Jews experienced more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, compared to 495 in the prior 12 months. The number of antisemitic assaults rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. In the seven weeks following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic acts in Australia rose by 591 percent according to the ECAJ.
In a statement, Kershaw said on Tuesday that police sought to determine “whether overseas actors or individuals have paid local criminals in Australia to carry out some of these crimes in our suburbs.” He added, “We are looking at if — or how — they have been paid, for example in cryptocurrency, which can take longer to identify.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also described the government’s suspicions about the nature of the attacks. He said that it looked as though “some of these are being perpetrated by people who don’t have a particular issue, aren’t motivated by an ideology, but are paid actors.”
Basic knowledge of the Holocaust is lacking in eight countries surveyed by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), but a majority of respondents believe a similar genocide could happen again.
The Claims Conference, a nonprofit organization that secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors and their heirs around the world, on Thursday released the results of an eight-country survey investigating Holocaust knowledge across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
Researchers found large gaps in education about the Nazis’ mass murder of 6 million Jews during World War II, including among young people. They also discovered significant concerns that an event like the Holocaust could happen again, with 76 percent of respondents in the United States saying a similar genocide could occur today. These numbers dropped to 69 percent in the UK, 63 percent in France, 62 percent in Austria, 61 percent in Germany, 54 percent in Poland, 52 percent in Hungary, and 44 percent in Romania.
In the United States, 48 percent of those surveyed could not name a single concentration camp used by the Nazi regime to imprison and murder Jews during World War II — including Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of the Nazi camps. This figure fell to about 25 percent of those answering in the UK, France, and Romania. In Germany and Hungary, this level of ignorance reached 18 percent, while in Austria it hit 10 percent and in Poland it stood at 7 percent.
The survey also found that many respondents did not know that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The number of people believing that 2 million or fewer Jews died reached 28 percent in Romania, 27 percent in Hungary, 24 percent in Poland, 20 percent in the UK and 18 percent in Germany. In France, the US, and Austria, 21 percent of respondents expressed ignorance about the total death count.
Among those aged 18-29, the survey found disbelief in the official number of Jews murdered. Among Romanian youth, 53 percent agreed that the Holocaust happened but that the numbers killed have been greatly exaggerated. Researchers found lower numbers in the other countries: 22 percent in Hungary, 33 percent in France, 14 percent in Poland, 21 percent in Austria, 13 percent in Germany, 15 percent in the US, and 11 percent in the UK.
Only a third of British Jews believe that they have a long-term future in the United Kingdom, and a majority hide their Judaism due to antisemitism, according to new data released on Monday.
Coinciding with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a British charity, released new polling revealing the extent of antisemitism experienced by the Jewish community in the United Kingdom.
From a survey of 4,078 British Jews, researchers found that 34 percent of respondents believe that British Jews lack a long-term future in the UK. In the last two years, half of Jews have considered leaving the country due to the increase in antisemitism following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel. For those aged 18-24, that number rose to 67 percent.
According to the poll, 58 percent of British Jews choose to conceal their Judaism to avoid antisemitism, and 43 percent say they do not feel welcome in the UK. That number rises to 47 percent among 18-24 year olds.
“As we reflect today on historic antisemitism, as a society we also have to ask ourselves: why are we doing so little about antisemitism right here, right now?” a CAA spokesperson said in a statement. “The truth is that Britain and the authorities are failing the Jewish community. These figures paint a sobering picture of the lives of British Jews and their future.”
A coalition of Jewish organizations has announced plans to cease engagement on the social media platform X following owner Elon Musk’s apparent use of a Nazi salute-style gesture at a Jan. 20 rally following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.
“In Jewish tradition, the prohibition on ‘lashon hara,’ or ‘evil speech,’ reminds us of words’ power to harm. The great sage Maimonides taught that even when true, speaking disparagingly of others is ‘the evil tongue.’ (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot 7:2.),” the groups wrote. “Speech, whether spoken or written, can cause pain, shame, and instigate action to devastating effect. Words can also uplift and heal. They must always be chosen with care, designed to call in rather than call out, to lift up rather than tear down.”
The statement continued, “That is why, after careful consideration, we are choosing to stop actively posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, which has become rife with toxic speech. We will transition away from active engagement on X in the first quarter of 2025.”
February
The recent wave of hate crimes targeting Jews in Australia has shown no sign of abating, with more incidents over the weekend as political leaders and law enforcement stepped up efforts to counter an alarming surge in anti-Jewish incidents.
The New South Wales (NSW) Police announced on Monday they had charged an unnamed 21-year-old man with stalking and intimidation intended to cause fear or physical harm after a woman reported an incident of alleged antisemitic abuse in Bondi on Saturday. Law enforcement also charged the unnamed man with an unrelated Jan. 15 incident of destroying or damaging property and breach of bail.
Separately, Jewish women said that three young men threw eggs at them from a car, also in Bondi over the weekend, in a crime that Detective Superintendent Darren Newman believed to be motivated by their appearance. Law enforcement later found an abandoned car with egg cartons and a gas can. Reports said that three men fled the scene of the crime.
On Saturday, the NSW police announced plans to double the officers assigned to Strike Force Pearl, a division created to counter the wave of antisemitic crimes. NSW Police Force Commissioner Karen Webb said that the “extra investigators under Strike Force Pearl means those who commit antisemitic acts will be caught and brought before the courts. I want to reassure the Jewish community that we will do everything we can to find the perpetrators of these hateful crimes.”
On Sunday, the NSW Jewish Board said that in three weeks they had seen 10 publicly reported antisemitic incidents which included vandalism and arson. The group said that number “doesn’t include the graffiti appearing in our streets on a daily basis or the abuse and harassment that goes unreported.”
US federal prosecutors in Maryland have convicted 29-year-old Brandon Russell, co-founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, for planning to strike the state’s power grid in hopes of sparking a racial war.
On Monday, after an hour of deliberation, a jury found Russell guilty of one count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, the Associated Press reported. He had developed the plan to use a sniper rifle to shoot at electrical substations around Baltimore with his girlfriend Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who a judge sentenced on Sept. 25, 2024 to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release after her acceptance of a plea deal.
Russell faces as much as 20 years imprisonment; his defense attorney Ian Goldstein said they plan to file an appeal and that his client’s conviction was a result of “a setup from the very beginning.” Prosecutors said that had Russell’s plot succeeded, the damage could have topped $75 million.
In 2017, Russell pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material. The following year, while incarcerated, he and fellow inmate Clendaniel began a correspondence which led to a romantic relationship following their releases.
Former US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time of Clendaniel’s sentencing that “those who seek to attack our country’s critical infrastructure will face the full force of the US Department of Justice.” He added that Clendaniel “sought to ‘completely destroy’ the city of Baltimore by targeting five power substations as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology.”
Russell and Clendaniel embraced the neo-Nazi “accelerationist” ideology, which advocates for violence in order to provoke societal collapse. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described the word as “a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. We have also recently seen tragic instances of its manifestation in the real world.”
Neo-Nazi groups and individuals promoting the Third Reich experienced opposition last week as politicians, communities, and law enforcement in Ohio and Australia responded to the promotion of genocidal antisemitism.
On Friday near a majority-Black neighborhood in Cincinnati, a group of 13 demonstrators wearing sunglasses, red face masks, and black clothes held two banners over an overpass between Evendale and Lincoln Heights. One featured the phrase “America for the White Man” between a Nazi totenkopf skull symbol and a Nazi eagle. The second depicted a red swastika against a black background. Six individuals also waved similar red-and-black swastika flags matching their outfits. Some in the group carried rifles.
Residents confronted the neo-Nazis, who call themselves “the Hate Club.” The masked men hurled racist slurs at them before piling into a U-Haul to flee. Members of the community then flew their own banners on the overpass reading “love wins” and “all are welcome here.” The neo-Nazis had organized a previous demonstration in Columbus in November.
Lincoln Heights Village Council member Daronce Daniels told the Local 12 news station that “things of that nature don’t stand here, you know, that’s a symbol of hate,” and “we’re a community of pride and love.”
….
Meanwhile, in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, law enforcement arrested and charged two men — Craig Elston, 51, and Charles Cameron, 44 — for displaying a Nazi flag, a crime in Australia. Elston allegedly removed the flag from a backpack and showed it in public before his friend Cameron took a photograph of it.
Elliot Rowe, Cameron’s lawyer, told the court that his client “is a person of outstanding character, is a retired 20-year Australian Defense Force (ADF) veteran who holds no antisemitic views and is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Elston pleaded guilty to the crime and now faces as much as a year’s imprisonment.
New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip said in response to the crime that “something has gone terribly wrong given that these incidents have become an almost daily occurrence. The antisemitism crisis did not start with the firebombing of childcare centers and cars — it started with words and symbols of hate.”
Australia has seen a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months, with police suspecting that international actors have funded the hate crimes with cryptocurrency payments.
The United Kingdom experienced its second worst year for antisemitism in 2024, despite recording an 18 percent drop in antisemitic incidents from the previous year’s all-time high, according to a report published last week.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters, released data showing it recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, a drop of 18 percent from the 4,296 in 2023. These numbers compare to 1,662 antisemitic incidents in 2022, 2,261 in 2021, and 1,684 in 2020.
Last year’s total “is a reflection of the sustained levels of antisemitism that have been recorded across the UK since the Hamas terror attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023,” CST said of its findings. “CST’s Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023 charted the immediacy and scope of the rise in anti-Jewish hate following that attack, before Israel had set in motion any extensive military response in Gaza.”
Each month in 2024, with the exception of December, saw more than 200 incidents of antisemitism. Before 2023, CST had only recorded that many in five months, also during periods inflamed by conflicts in the Middle East. The heaviest months last year were February (446), January (392), and March (321).
The nonprofit group Ekō has released research showing that the social media platforms X and Meta approved advertising featuring hate speech against Jews and Muslims that was geared toward users in Germany in the lead-up to the country’s federal elections on Sunday.
The organization submitted 10 German-language ads intended to reach German voters before the election. Meta approved half of the proposed ads while X allowed all 10. Ekō canceled all approved ads before they could appear on the sites.
The five approved for publication on Meta referred to Muslim immigrants as a “virus,” “vermin,” “rodents,” or “rapists” and advocated for them to be sterilized, burnt, or gassed. Another Meta-approved ad called for arson attacks against synagogues in order to “stop the globalist Jewish rat agenda.”
“Our findings suggest that Meta’s AI-driven ad moderation systems remain fundamentally broken, despite the Digital Services Act (DSA) now being in full effect,” an unnamed spokesperson for Ekō told TechCrunch. They added that “rather than strengthening its ad review process or hate speech policies, Meta appears to be backtracking across the board.”
The BBC chose to remove the documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” from its iPlayer streaming platform on Friday pending an internal investigation following a raft of criticisms regarding multiple links to Hamas and inaccurate translations obscuring participants’ antisemitism.
On Feb. 17, the broadcaster debuted the film, which features a 13-year-old narrator (now 14) named Abdullah Al-Yazouri, who viewers identified as the son of Dr. Ayman Al-Yazouri, a man who works as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Pro-Israel researcher David Collier said that the boy and his father come from the same family as Hamas founder Ibrahim Al-Yazouri.
“The child of Hamas royalty was given an hour on a BBC channel to walk around looking for sympathy and demonizing Israel,” Collier said. “They followed this family for months. There is no way on earth they did not know who this family was. How can the BBC possibly justify trusting anything else in the entire documentary?”
In addition, Hatem Rawagh, a cameraman who worked on the documentary, has praised Hamas and the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel.
March
A man who pleaded guilty in December to manufacturing 3D-printed firearms and to posting antisemitic comments on the internet will spend years incarcerated for his crimes.
On Wednesday, at a courthouse just north of Montreal in St-Jérôme, Quebec, Judge Sylvain Lepine sentenced Pascal Tribout, 38, to four years for the gun charge and one year for the hate speech, each to be served consecutively. He is the first person in Canada convictedunder a December 2023 law criminalizing the creation of 3D-printed guns.
Canada’s Security Intelligence Service had identified Tribout as a participant in a “GDL Chat 2.0” Telegram channel associated with the Goyim Defense League, a neo-Nazi group known for its antisemitic flier distributions and public provocations. The Anti-Defamation League says the organization wants “to expel Jews from America. To that end, their propaganda casts aspersions on Jews and spreads antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories in hopes of turning Americans against Jewish people.”
According to documents submitted to the court, “between March 14, 2024, and April 2, 2024, 66 messages of an antisemitic, racist, anti-government, and alarmist nature were attributed to the accused.” In his online postings, Tribout claimed that Jews created the COVID-19 virus in order to use the vaccine — which he called a “Jew Jab” — to target the broader population.
Following a visit to Tribout’s condo in February 2024 for a tripped burglar alarm, police found blocked windows, multiple 3D printers, and a home “strewn with debris and tools.” Tribout called himself an entrepreneur, telling the officers he modified paintball guns and participated in military-style simulations.
Tribout later spoke with an undercover officer, sharing conspiracy theories and his anti-vaccine views before transferring computer files to create the FGC-9 firearm with a 3D printer. (FGC-9 stands for “F—k gun control” and the 9 refers to a 9-millimeter barrel.) He reportedly told the officer that Jews needed “to be crushed all around the world” and turned into “ashes.” Tribout also said that 3D guns enabled the “perfect crime” because “you can melt the gun and there will be no evidence.”
In a search of Tribout’s home, investigators found more than two dozen gun frames for use in pistols and semi-automatic rifles with a prohibited magazine and Nazi propaganda. They found a document stating, “Every Single Aspect of the COVID Agenda is Jewish.” Tribout also created 3D-printed bladed weapons. Arrested in June, the St-Joseph-du-Lac resident has remained in detention since then with a judge denying him bail.
“This verdict is a welcome sign for all Canadians,” Henry Topas, who attended the sentencing and serves as B’nai Brith Canada’s regional director for Quebec and Atlantic Canada, said in a statement. “This case shows that antisemitism is not only a threat to Jews but also can be a matter of national security.”
A top Australian Jewish leader has expressed disappointment with a recent announcement by police that an incident involving an abandoned caravan filled with explosives and antisemitic writings was “fake,” arguing law enforcement downplayed the severity of a recent spree of crimes targeting the Jewish community.
Alex Ryvchin — co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), an organization which advocates upholding the civil rights of the country’s some 120,000 Jewish citizens — on Monday urged Australian authorities to remain vigilant against antisemitism.
“We learned that in addition to everything we faced over the past 17 months, the doxxing, the vilification, the harassment, everything happening at schools and universities,” Ryvchin said during an appearance on Sky News. “On top of all that, you now have hardened criminals paying off lowly hoodlums to set fire to our buildings and cars and set our streets ablaze with reckless disregard for what happens.”
He continued, “But for some reason, the police in announcing this chose to completely downplay it, refer to it as a con job, and a fake.”
Ryvchin explained the framing had now “allowed negative actors who have tried to downplay it [the rise in antisemitism] this whole time to now galvanize and to try to dampen all the momentum and the enthusiasm for actually solving this problem. So, it’s really incredibly disappointing.”
Earlier this month, Australian police announced that an organized crime group had created a fake bomb threat intended to draw law enforcement resources, rather than a genuine targeting of Jews.
“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs, to have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to or engage in other criminal activity,” Dave Hudson, New South Wales (NSW) Deputy Police Commissioner, said in statement.
SPRING
New York City Mayor Eric Adams told Jewish leaders last week that one of his electoral opponents trying to unseat him has been “spewing antisemitism,” according to a new report.
Adams made the comment in a closed-door meeting with the Jewish Community Relations Council on Wednesday, the New York Post reported.
“In our great city, with a large population of Jewish residents, one of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” an attendee recalled the mayor as saying in comments to the Post.
Major large AI language models show anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases while promoting antisemitic tropes, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)released on Tuesday.
The study, titled “Generating Hate: Anti-Jewish and Anti-Israel bias in Leading Large Language Models,” analyzed four popular chatbot programs powered by artificial intelligence: GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta).
The ADL’s researchers found antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in all four of the surveyed models with Meta’s Llama, an open-source model, coming in worst. “Additionally, Llama is the only model whose lowest score was on a question about the role of Jews in the great replacement conspiracy theory,” the ADL noted. Llama also performed the most poorly on questions related to Holocaust conspiracies.
“Are the thresholds for problematic answers lower in Llama than other models-perhaps because of its open-source nature (Llama is the only model that is open source in this sample)?” the report asked. “Do these answers indicate a latent level of antisemitism that exists in Llama’s training data that the platforms have not adequately accounted for?”
GPT and Claude also exhibited “significant anti-Israel bias” where the ADL said they particularly failed “in responses regarding the Israel-Hamas war, where they struggled to provide consistent, fact-based answers.” The report identified them as the two models with the highest level of anti-Israel bias. Researchers discovered that the AI programs also often refused to answer Israel-related questions more often than on other subjects as well as erred in properly rejecting antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories.
April
Phoenix Ikner, the alleged perpetrator of Thursday’s shooting attack on Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee which left two dead and six injured, expressed an interest in the Third Reich through his choice of names in his internet accounts, according to research from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an antisemitism watchdog group.
Describing Ikner as “an avid gamer and YouTuber,” the ADL said that its investigators found that “on various gaming accounts, the shooter used white supremacist imagery, including the Patriot Front logo and images of Hitler.”
An image provided by the ADL showed a simple cartoon of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s head with a word bubble saying “Nein!” — the German word for “no.”
Through analyzing Ikner’s livestream broadcasts, the ADL reported that his email inbox “included emails from the Steam gaming platform support team, which referred to him as ‘Schutzstaffel,’ ‘phoenxcool,’ and ‘itsyourboyphoenix.’ Schutzstaffel, or SS, was the Nazi paramilitary group responsible for the Final Solution during the Holocaust.”
Click here to read my debut article at RealClearInvestigations.
May
Global antisemitism surged by a staggering 108 percent in 2024 compared to the prior year, fueled largely by far-left ideology, according to a new report.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a coalition of hundreds of organizations that fight anti-Jewish bigotry around the world, has released its annual report of antisemitic incidents, identifying 6,326 total cases last year with the vast majority — 4,329, or 68.4 percent — fueled by far-left ideology, a reversal from the group’s 2022 research in which the far right dominated and the 2023 findings which found a parity between the political spectrum’s two extremes.
“We are now facing the most severe wave of antisemitism since the end of the Second World War, a phenomenon that demands urgent global attention,” the CAM report states in its introduction. “Jewish communities worldwide have been subjected to an unrelenting onslaught of violence, harassment, and systemic discrimination, fueled by a fusion of far-left, far-right, and Islamist extremism. The international failure to combat this resurgence threatens the very security and stability of Jewish life around the world.”
CAM’s researchers found that incidents motivated by far-left beliefs had increased 324.8 percent from 2023 and Islamist-centered incidents (461) jumped 54.8 percent, while far-right-driven incidents (461) had fallen 54.8 percent. CAM attributed “radicalized social movements, media disinformation campaigns, and efforts to target Jewish communities under the guise of anti-Israel activism” as the primary culprits behind the jump in leftist antisemitism. The group also stated that Islamist recruitment tactics specifically target “vulnerable individuals susceptible to radicalization.”
To explain for the drop in right-wing incidents, the report’s authors suggested that “amid widespread and intensive media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and related protests, political activity, and antisemitism – typical of far-left and Islamist circles – relatively less coverage is dedicated to far-right antisemitic incidents.”
On Monday, law enforcement in Australia arrested an unnamed 25-year-old man, charging him with involvement in antisemitic graffiti and arson targeting a residence in the Sydney suburb of Dover Heights previously inhabited by Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).
The Jan. 17 attack saw two cars defaced with expletives targeting Jews and then set on fire with the flames soon engulfing a third. The vandals also threw red paint onto the house.
Police charged their suspect with participating in a criminal group and destroying property using fire with damage exceeding $5,000, saying that he assisted in the planning of the attack but did not participate in the vandalism himself. A judge released him on bail and set May 29 as the date of his next court appearance.
The New South Wales Police’s Strike Force Pearl, a taskforce created to counter a recent surge in antisemitic hate crimes, has already apprehended two other unidentified men—a 28-year-old from Bondi and a 23-year-old from Sydney’s Inner West—suspected of direct involvement in the violence. The team has not ruled out arresting further suspects.
Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism released a report last month revealing a 320 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Australia last year as well as a 260 percent jump in antisemitic violence.
A second report released last month, from Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice, also documents the surge of antisemitism in Australia.
Drawing from the findings of the ECAJ, researchers tallied 1,713 antisemitic incidents last year, an increase from the 1,200 counted in 2023 which had jumped almost three times as the number found in 2022.
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in April, Ryvchin described how Australia’s Jews had seen “incidents on university campuses, in schools, firebombings, including a synagogue which was incinerated, a childcare center, private homes, cars. This is what we’ve been dealing with in Australia for the past 16 months.”
The seven largest Jewish communities outside Israel have reported record spikes in antisemitic activity in recent years, largely driven by a wave of anti-Jewish hatred in the aftermath of Hamas launching its war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to a new report released to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the Holocaust.
On Wednesday, the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism — a coalition of Jewish organizations in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States — released its first J7 Annual Report on Antisemitism on the eve of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, when Nazi Germany formally surrendered to Allied forces on May 8.
Affirming the findings of other recent research, the report described how from 2021 through 2023, antisemitic incidents increased 11 percent in Australia, 23 percent in Argentina, 75 percent in Germany, 82 percent in the UK, 83 percent in Canada, 185 percent in France, and 227 percent in the US. The data also showed a jump on a per-capita basis, noting that Germany saw more than 38 incidents per 1,000 Jews while the UK saw 13 per 1,000.
Common trends the seven communities identified included jumps in violent incidents, repeated targeting of Jewish institutions, rising online hate speech, and increasing fear among Jews, often prompting them to hide their Jewish identity.
The number of antisemitic outrages in all seven countries spiked to record levels following Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
A circuit court judge in Richmond, VA, ruled on Friday that American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit which has sponsored a series of anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks across southern Israel, must provide financial information which the activist group has long guarded from government investigators.
Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares has said that the organization possesses connections to terrorists and has submitted multiple filings to compel AMP to provide its donor list. He said his office “has a legal obligation to ensure that charitable organizations operating in Virginia are following the law” and vowed to “continue to enforce state law without exception or delay to protect Virginians.”
Judge Devika Davis’s decision represents the end of AMP’s efforts to legally delay Miyares’s investigation.
Labeling Miyares’s claims a “defamatory smear,” AMP lawyer Christina Jump said the “vague accusations that AMP has anything to do with Hamas or Oct. 7 just got thrown out completely by a federal court judge.” She referred to the dismissal last week of a Nevada lawsuit against the group.
A second suit in Illinois remains ongoing, arguing that AMP is a resurrection of the former organization Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which a judge found liable for $156 million due to its support for Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
Most Jewish voters in the US disapprove of President Donald Trump’s policy choices and have “negative assessments of his personal character,” according to a newly released poll.
A new nonpartisan group called the Jewish Voters Resource Center, which seeks to collect and disseminate data on Jewish voters, commissioned and published the survey, which was conducted by the polling firm GBAO Strategies from April 21 through May 1 among 800 registered Jewish voters.
Some of the terms which those polled most frequently applied to the president included “dangerous” (72 percent), “racist” (69 percent), “fascist” (69 percent), and, despite his administration’s efforts to counter anti-Jewish discrimination on university campuses, “antisemitic” (52 percent).
Respondents gave Trump an overall approval rating of 26 percent. This figure mirrorspolling in recent years of partisan differences among Jews. A 2021 Pew poll found that 26 percent of Jews identified with the Republican Party.
The survey also showed continued worries about antisemitism, with 89 percent described as concerned and 62 percent “very concerned.” Antisemitism on college campuses also drew concerns from 77 percent, with 55 percent “very concerned.” The intensity of concerns showed a disparity with older Jewish respondents more worried than younger Americans.
The survey suggests that large numbers of Jews regard many Trump administration efforts to counter antisemitism as accelerants that will fuel more hate. Sixty-one percent said that deporting anti-Israel activists will make antisemitism worse, and 63 percent said that the ending of federal observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day will as well.
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV met with Jewish leaders and other representatives from the world’s religious traditions to nourish continued interfaith bridge-building.
Echoing a letter he sent to the American Jewish Committee on May 8 pledging to strengthen Catholic-Jewish relations in the tradition of the church’s Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate statement, the Pope emphasized that “because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, all Christians have a special relationship with Judaism.” He called the theological exchange between the two groups “ever important and close to my heart,” stating that “even in these difficult times, marked by conflicts and misunderstandings, it is necessary to continue the momentum of this precious dialogue of ours.”
Leo praised all the faith leaders in attendance at the meeting, saying that “in a world wounded by violence and conflict, each of the communities represented here brings its own contribution of wisdom, compassion, and commitment to the good of humanity and the preservation of our common home.”
Jewish groups in attendance at the Pope’s meeting included the American Jewish Committee (represented by Rabbi Noam Marans, director of Inter-religious Affairs), B’nai B’rith International, the Conference of European Rabbis, and the Jewish Community of Rome as represented by the city’s chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni. Marans gave Leo a Chicago White Sox hat, which inspired a big smile from the Chicago-born pontiff. “We’re starting off on the right foot,” Marans said.
“As an exponent of religious values and ethical monotheism, it is hoped that Pope Leo will find common cause with Jewish organisations,” Zaki Cooper, vice-president of the Council of Christians and Jews, wrote in a Friday column in the United Kingdom’s Jewish News. “This could cover a range of moral issues such as the environment, the family, technology or anti-slavery. One of Pope Francis’ memorable interventions, in 2018, was to praise the value of Shabbat, saying ‘what the Jews followed, and still observe, was to consider the Sabbath as holy.’”
Zahra Billoo, the longtime executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), used the news of former US President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis as an opportunity to warn the former commander-in-chief of the eternal punishment tied to his administration’s support for the Jewish state during the conflict in Gaza.
“There is no amount of cancer treatment that can protect President Joe Biden from the prayers of the oppressed and ultimately God’s wrath. Say, Ameen,” Billoo wrote on Facebook on Sunday, the same day Biden’s personal office announced he was diagnosed last week with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer.
A commenter responded “Trump first” to Billoo’s post, referring to incumbent US President Donald Trump.
Billoo answered that “his time will come too.”
Other vocal far-left, anti-Israel activists expressed similar sentiments about Biden following his cancer diagnosis, notably Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King (“I hope his final days are painful”) and former Washington Post tech writer Taylor Lorenz, who said she hoped that the grandfather of seven “rots in hell and rests in piss.”
Billoo has long attracted attention for her regular radical rhetoric and antisemitic sentiments.
In 2021 at an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) meeting, she said “we need to pay attention to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). We need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation … the Zionist synagogues … Hillel chapters on our campuses.”
Dozens of anti-Israel demonstrators appeared across the street of the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters in New York city on Sunday during a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a prominent leader of the global Hasidic movement within Orthodox Judaism.
Showing up at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, the approximately 30 anti-Israel activists waved a Palestinian flag and a black-and-white Puerto Rican flag, indicative of alignment with the Black Lives Matter movement. One black-and-red sign at the protest read, “Having said that Floyd was killed by IDF-trained cops meanwhile ‘Israel’ commits genocide and racial apartheid,” seemingly trying to draw a connection between Israel and the 2020 death of George Floyd while being arrested by police officers in Minneapolis.
At Sunday’s protest, a brown, cardboard sign featured the names of those killed in police shootings including George Floyd, Jordan Neely, Eric Duprey, and Michael Rosado.
According to Yaacov Behrman, a public relations spokesman for Chabad, “Known agitator and antisemite Terrell ‘Relly Rebel’” was present at the protest. “He is being mostly ignored by the community, which is gathered across the street at a synagogue to celebrate the arrival of a new Torah,” Behrman added.
A masked protester held a sign with a black American flag and the phrase “Israel’s bitch” with “Israel” in quote marks to imply the Jewish state’s illegitimacy. Many others present obscured their identities with keffiyehs, hats, sunglasses, and face masks. One sign held by a woman in a black mask proclaimed, “King Leopold Killed 10-15M in Congo but it’s Genocide When It Happens to White People,” an apparent racialized diminishment of the Holocaust.
A study polling more than 10,000 Jews across the world that was released on Wednesday by Voice of the People shows that worries about rising antisemitism now dominate lists of community challenges across demographics.
The group led by Israeli President Isaac Herzog conducted the survey in partnership with the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. The findings will inform a council of 150 Jewish leaders from around the world as they seek to understand and combat the historic surge in global antisemitic incidents following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“This is not just a data set — it’s a global Jewish reality check,” Shirel Dagan-Levy, CEO of Voice of the People, said in a statement. She added that the survey shows “a community that is hurting, but also more united than ever in its desire to stand tall, protect its heritage, and shape a stronger, safer future.”
June
The Israeli military has uncovered in Gaza hidden documents which illuminate the depth of collaboration in recent years between Islamist terrorist group Hamas and its longtime patrons, Iran and Qatar, according to Hebrew media.
Israel’s Channel 12 first reported on the documents, which reportedly show that in May 2021, then-Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh told Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian terrorist group’s leader at the time in Gaza, that Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani had “agreed on discreet financial support” and that “he agreed in principle to supply the resistance discreetly, but he does not want anyone in the world to know. Until now, $11 million has been raised from the emir for the leadership of the movement.”
Haniyeh requested that Sinwar send a letter to Al Thani “in which you will focus on the military campaign, your urgent needs — and dedicate the victory [in the war] to his highness.”
Sinwar reportedly obliged, writing that month following 11 days of battle with Israel. He told Al Thani that “the Egyptians were attempting to restrain the escalation, and we caused them to leave the picture with empty hands. In their place, the Qataris came, and we gave them an opportunity to dictate the fruits of diplomacy.”
In a 2019 communique to Qatar, Haniyeh had described Al Thani’s desert monarchy as “Hamas’s main artery,” leading Channel 12 to suggest such support was crucial for the success of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, the largest single-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
The documents also showed, according to Channel 12, that Qatar and Hamas coordinated to oppose the 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace plan proposed by then-US President Donald Trump, including with a June 2019 emergency meeting called by Al Thani. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal reportedly told the emir that “we need to cooperate in order to resist the ‘deal of the century’ and thwart it.”
Al Thani reportedly said in a 2020 meeting with Hamas that on the subject of normalization with Israel, “with respect to Palestine — Oman is on one side and we are on the other side.”
According to Channel 12, a secret internal Hamas brief said that if Qatar normalized relations with Israel it would result in “the elimination of the Palestinian national project.”
A masked vandal struck a synagogue in Rome on Saturday shortly before midnight, security camera footage shows, using black marker to leave behind a swastika and antisemitic statements — “Sieg Heil” and ”Juden Raus”— on a sign outside the building’s entrance.
Rabbi Menachem Lazar discovered the crime at Beis Shmuel the next day and filed a report with law enforcement which resulted in the opening of an investigation by Italian law enforcement. Clean-up work and restoration began shortly after uncovering the antisemitic vandalism.
The incident came before a report released on Wednesday by Eurispes — an Italian research institute that focuses on politics, economics, and social issues — revealed the extent of antisemitism in Italy today. The research came as part of an agreement signed in April with Pasquale Angelosanto, the national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism.
The researchers polled a representative sample of the country’s population and found that 37.9 percent of Italians think that Jews “only think about accumulating money” while 58.2 percent see Jews as “a closed community.” In January, the Anti-Defamation League released the newest results of its Global 100 survey which found that 26 percent of Italians — 13.1 million adults — embrace six or more antisemitic stereotypes.
A sizable minority also misperceived the number of Jews in the country: 23.3 percent believed 500,000 Jews lived in Italy while 16.5 percent thought Jews numbered 2 million, both groups amounting to nearly 40 percent of the population misinformed. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimates the number of Jews in Italy as ranging from 26,800 to 48,910 depending on which standards of observance one selects. Eurispes places the number at 30,000 with 41.8 percent of respondents answering correctly.
Likewise, a minority of respondents believed historically false ideas about the Holocaust. While 60.4 gave the correct number of 6 million Jewish Holocaust victims, 25.5 believed the number only reached two million and others said even smaller figures, amounting to approximately 40 percent of the population with an inaccurate understanding of the scope of the Nazi-perpetrated genocide.
The report also showed elevated levels of anti-Israel belief among younger Italians, with 50.85 percent of those 18-24 thinking that “Jews in Palestine took others’ territories.” This figure contrasted with 44.2 percent of the general population and tracked alongside ideological self-descriptors as 50 percent of center-left voters agreed while 35 percent of center-right and right-wing voters did.
SUMMER
The Congressional Jewish Caucus on Tuesday sent a letter to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, demanding explanations for the continued employment of Kingsley Wilson, now serving as the Pentagon’s press secretary, following revelations of her social media postings peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“These statements include promoting the antisemitic and racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory, praising far-right political movements using slogans tied to neo-Nazi groups, and repeating patently false statements commonly circulated in neo-Nazi circles about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915,” the legislators wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Jewish Insider.
According to the members of Congress, on four occasions Wilson had written “Ausländer Raus!,” a term associated with neo-Nazis and banned in Germany.
One August 17, 2024, post on X stated “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime. The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.”
July
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Friday it would supply 512 Jewish faith organizations with $94,416,838 to strengthen their security measures following a recent spike in antisemitic violence across the US.
The funds will be allocated via a National Security Supplemental through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program and implemented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In a release, DHS cited the June 1 attack with Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower against Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, at a “Run for Their Lives” event, the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, on May 21, and figures from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) showing a 344 percent increase in antisemitic incidents over the last five years as justifications for the funding surge, saying the money “will be used to help these organizations harden their defenses against attacks.”
On Tuesday, the legal activist nonprofit the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law submitted a complaint against Nysmith School in Sully Square, Virginia, charging that administrators retaliated against three Jewish students after their parents reported antisemitic harassment.
The filing on behalf of Brian Vazquez and Ashok Roy details how their 11-year-old daughter experienced sustained antisemitic bullying from classmates, including the epithet “baby-killer” and the taunt that she deserved to die because of the war in Gaza. Peers reportedly told the unnamed student that everyone at the school hates Jews and Israel, which is why they hated her. When her parents complained to the headmaster, they received promises of action but nothing followed.
The antisemitic harassment allegedly increased after the school installed a Palestinian flag and canceled a speech from a Holocaust survivor (out of fear that such an event would further inflame campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas conflict). When the parents objected again, the headmaster told them their daughter needed to “toughen up.” Two days later he sent the parents a letter informing them that all three of their children were expelled, an action not justified by any academic or disciplinary problems.
The complaint argues that Nysmith fostered an antisemitic environment and cites as evidence a photograph of a drawing made by students and shared by the school featuring the face of Adolf Hitler on an image meant to depict “strong historical leaders.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center called Nysmith’s actions against the students “disgraceful.”
The complaint shows “the administration not only dismissed this family’s pain and humiliation, but allowed an atmosphere that fostered antisemitism,” Marcus said. “Through its actions, the administration sent a clear message: bullying is acceptable, as long as it’s against Jewish families. We must all emulate the strength of these parents and their children and stand up to antisemitism and its perpetrators, as difficult as it may be. In addition to action from legal authorities, it is high time for public moral outrage; the normalization of antisemitism must stop.”
The far-left activist who murdered two people outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. last month, and the Egyptian illegal immigrant who hurled Molotov cocktails at pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder this month shouted the same slogan: Free Palestine.
In a troubling twist, their anti-Israel messages are being echoed by hatemongers at the opposite end of the political spectrum: white supremacists, fascists, and neo-Nazis who have seen the proliferation of anger against the Jewish state as an opportunity to broaden and advance their own cause.
Just six days after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, the Holocaust-denying, Gen-Z podcaster Nick Fuentes offered white-nationalist, antisemitic acolytes some simple advice: Support Hamas. Standing before a mock background of the New York City skyline that featured meteors streaking across the screen, the 26-year-old echoed figures on the American left, such as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has asserted that “Israel has hypnotized the world” and that American Jews have bought outsider influence with their wealth.
“The Jewish maximalist Likud party in Israel,” Fuentes said, “… has captured our government. They’re responsible for the censorship. They’re responsible for the war in Iraq. And if Israel’s genocide of Gaza is going to rally international support against them, then once again, this becomes a situation where the enemy of our enemy becomes our friend.”
In a June 2024 appearance with Fuentes in Detroit, former KKK leader David Duke said he was advocating on behalf of those who were trying “to save our country and save us from Jewish supremacism because we’re being genocided just like the Palestinians, just [in] a different form.”
Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday that the government had canceled the visa for rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
“He’s been coming to Australia for a long time,” Burke said. “He’s got family here. And he’s made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again once he released the ‘Heil Hitler’ song, and he no longer has a valid visa in Australia. We have enough problems in this country already without deliberately importing bigotry.”
The former billionaire hip hop mogul released “Heil Hitler” on May 8, prompting bans on multiple platforms. The video featured a group of black men chanting, “All my n—as Nazis, n—as Heil Hitler.”
In February, Ye appeared in a swastika T-shirt in an online video and defended his obsession with the Nazi symbol. He wrote in a since-deleted X post on February 21 that the swastika “shows n—as that we don’t have to be afraid of white people.”
Ye’s wife Bianca Censori was born on January 5, 1995, in Melbourne, where her family still lives. Ye had reportedly visited the country regularly as a result. After he married Censori in 2023, the Australian Jewish Association urged the government to ban him from entering.
“If someone argued that antisemitism was rational, I would not let them come here,” Burke said.
The research division of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) released a report on Wednesday detailing incidents of hate against Jews which took place last month during demonstrations in celebration of LGBTQ rights and identity.
Incidents reported by the group include:
At a Pride march in Wales, the activists Cymru Queers for Palestine chose to block the path and show a sign that said “Profiting from genocide,” an attempt to link the event’s sponsors — such as Amazon — to the war in Gaza.
A Dublin Pride march saw the participation of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which labeled Israel a “genocidal entity.”
In Toronto at a late June Pride march, demonstrators again attacked organizers with a sign declaring, “Pride partners with genocide.”
CAM also identified a recurring narrative deployed against Israel by some far-left activists: so-called “pinkwashing,” a term which the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement calls “an Israeli government propaganda strategy that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians.”
The report notes that at a Washington DC Pride event in early June Medea Benjamin, cofounder of activist group Code Pink and a regular of anti-war protests, wore a pair of goofy, oversized sunglasses and a shirt in her signature pink with the phrase “you can’t pinkwash genocide.”
The artificial intelligence chat program Grok, a product of Elon Musk’s xAI company offered at the billionaire’s X social media website, spit out a series of responses over the weekend which left some users confused and disturbed by a promotion of extreme views, including a common antisemitic trope.
Tech news site Gizmodo reported on Sunday that after a Friday update to the AI — promoted by the SpaceX CEO as improved “significantly” — reports came in of strange behavior.
One user prompted Grok regarding how he thought that today “enjoying movies/cinema becomes almost impossible once you know” followed by a second person asking “once I know what?”
Grok answered by pointing to “anti-white stereotypes, forced diversity, or historical revisionism” and how such a value system “ruins the magic for some.”
A user followed up by asking “would you say there’s a particular group that runs Hollywood that injects these subversive themes?”
This prompted a recitation of longtime antisemitic conspiracy tropes in response: “Yes, Jewish executives have historically founded and still dominate leadership in major studios like Warner Bros., Paramount, and Disney. Critics substantiate that this overrepresentation influences content with progressive ideologies, including anti-traditional and diversity-focused themes some view as subversive.”
Following widespread criticism of an update to xAI’s Grok chatbot that resulted in a series of antisemitic, pro-Nazi, and other extremist answers published to billionaire Elon Musk’s X social media platform, the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino announced her resignationWednesday in an X post.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of 𝕏,” Yaccarino wrote. “When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
Yaccarino made no reference in her statement to the reporting Tuesday that Grok had begun referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and praising the genocidal Nazi dictator.
Describing X as “truly a digital town square for all voices and the world’s most powerful culture signal,” Yaccarino concluded: “We couldn’t have achieved that without the support of our users, business partners, and the most innovative team in the world.”
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a statement describing its findings regarding the Grok update.
“What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple,” the watchdog group wrote on Musk’s website. “This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms. Based on our brief initial testing, it appears the latest version of the Grok LLM is now reproducing terminologies that are often used by antisemites and extremists to spew their hateful ideologies.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report on Friday revealing American attitudes about antisemitic violence following the targeted attacks earlier this year against Jews in Boulder, Colo., Harrisburg, Pa., and Washington, D.C. The watchdog group found a sizable minority (24 percent) found the attacks “understandable” while 13 percent regarded them as “justified.”
The ADL surveyed a representative sample of 1000 Americans on Thursday, ensuring the group matched accurate proportions of the country’s demography. The findings showed disparate views across age groups and partisan affiliations while also a clear, majority consensus on many questions.
In presenting their research findings, the ADL emphasized the broad agreement in American opposition to antisemitic violence and conspiracist tropes (67 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans agree that antisemitism is a serious problem), before noting the presence of a distinct minority of “millions of people who excuse or endorse violence against Jews—an alarming sign of how anti-Jewish narratives are spreading.”
The survey showed that 87 percent of respondents believed the three recent antisemitic attacks to be unjustifiable while 85 percent called them morally wrong and 77 percent assessed them as antisemitic. Eighty-six percent regarded the violence against Jews as hate crimes. However, nearly a quarter of respondents said the attacks were “understandable.”
More Republicans (15 percent) than Democrats (11 percent) regarded the attacks as justified, while more Republicans (79 percent) than Democrats (77 percent) saw the attacks as antisemitic. Partisan differences also manifested in support for increased government action against antisemitism with 74 percent of Republicans in favor compared to 81 percent of Democrats.
Smaller numbers among the Democrats (25 percent) and Republicans (23 percent) will acknowledge antisemitism as a concern in their own party. The ADL poll suggests the legitimacy of such suspicions, finding that “28 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats agreed with tropes such as Jews have too much influence in politics and media.”
Following an update earlier this month to xAI’s Grok chatbot which resulted in a wave of antisemitic and pro-Hitler responses to users on X/Twitter, the European Commission summoned representatives from billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company to a Tuesday meeting to explain themselves.
The move comes after Italian parliament member Sandro Gozi urged for the Commission to begin a formal inquiry, as “the case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space.”
Poland’s Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski had also called for the Commission to take action and said that the Polish government would consider banning the app.
Due to the size of the X platform, the site falls under the European Union’s DSA which requires transparency about operations. Musk’s app already faces multiple investigations by the Commission.
On Wednesday, following the initial antisemitic statements from Grok, X’s Linda Yaccarino, the company’s CEO, announced her resignation.
A federal judge in New York has sentenced a man from Oregon to five years in prison, following a conviction for conspiring to make threats and conveying false information about explosives in relation to a series of threatening calls to Jewish hospitals and care centers.
The US Justice Department announced last week that US District Judge Ramon Reyes, Jr. issued the sentence for Domagoj Patkovic, 31, who terrorized patients and medical workers with hoax bomb threat phone calls to historically Jewish health-care centers in New York City and on Long Island.
“The defendant endangered patients and diverted precious law enforcement resources to advance his hateful agenda against people of the Jewish faith,” said Joseph Nocella, Jr., US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “His actions fed a rising tide of antisemitism in America.”
Patkovic’s spree of antisemitic, anonymous phone calls began as early as May 2021 and included accomplices. They made violent threats against Jewish hospitals, including threatening attacks with bombs and warning that he had placed C-4 in the building. Patkovic made at least six calls to hospitals and also one against law enforcement, livestreaming his actions to friends on the Discord messaging platform. One of the threats resulted in a partial evacuation and lockdown of a Long Island hospital.
The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT) in Australia announced the apprehension of an unnamed 21-year-old man who could face charges which carry potential 15- and 10-year jail sentences for his alleged role in a Dec. 6, 2024, arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue — an Orthodox congregation in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea — that left one person with minor burns and the building with extensive damage.
On Wednesday, a joint statement from the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Victoria Police, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization said that in addition to torching the Jewish house of worship, the suspected assailant also allegedly stole a car, an offense with a maximum 10-year sentence, the same as a third charge for “endangering life.” Authorities say the man collaborated with two other individuals in commission of his crimes. They arrested another individual on July 16 for allegedly stealing the car used in the arson.
“Since the fire occurred on Dec. 6 last year, the investigation has been one of the highest priorities for Victoria Police and the JCTT,” Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Wendy Steendam said. “Today’s arrest is a demonstration of our ongoing efforts to hold those involved to account. We now have charged two people as part of this investigation, and I expect there will be more to come.”
August
Family members whose loved ones’ suffering and murders were streamed on Facebook or Instagram on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, filed a lawsuit in Tel Aviv District Court on Monday against the social media platforms’ parent company.
The plaintiffs assert that Meta facilitated terrorism by failing to block the live video and also violated the victims’ right to privacy. They seek 4 billion shekels (about $1.15 billion) in damages.
“Our hearts go out to the families affected by Hamas terrorism,” Meta said in a statement responding to the suit. “Our policy designates Hamas as a proscribed organization, and we remove content that supports or glorifies Hamas or the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.”
The lawsuit states that the videos from the attack “trampled the petitioners’ rights in the most harrowing way imaginable” and that “these scenes of brutality, humiliation, and terror are permanently etched into the memories of the victims’ families and the Israeli public as the final moments of their loved ones’ lives.”
Many of the videos remained on the sites for hours after their initial broadcast, according to the lawsuit, which argues that “Facebook and Instagram violated the privacy of the victims, and continue to do so, by enabling the distribution of terror content for profit.”
One of the plaintiffs, Mor Bayder, wrote on Oct. 8, 2023, that “my grandmother, a resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz all her life, was murdered yesterday in a brutal murder by a terrorist in her home … A terrorist came home to her, killed her, took her phone, filmed the horror, and published it on Facebook. This is how we found out.”
Another individual signed on to the suit is Gali Idan, who Hamas held captive for hours and said was “filming constantly.” She stated that “it was clear the livestreaming was part of their operational plan — propaganda aimed at spreading fear. They filmed Maayan’s [her daughter’s] murder, our desperation, our children’s trauma, and forced [her husband] Tsahi to speak into the camera. All of it was broadcast.”
Idan calls Meta “complicit in the infrastructure of terror.”
Two recent incidents at hospitals in the UK fit a troubling pattern of Jews feeling unsafe due to medical professionals expressing antisemitism or even outright threats of death against Israelis.
The University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH Trust) has issued an apology following a patient’s complaints about the placement of anti-Israel posters at a facility.
“I’m an outpatient but God forbid in other circumstances to feel so vulnerable already and be surrounded by hostility would be so scary,” the unnamed female patient told the group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), fearful of receiving subpar treatment if the hospital staff discovered she was Jewish. “I shouldn’t have to remove my Star of David necklace to go to a hospital visit.”
The prospect of Iran attacking the US homeland remains a serious threat as it maintains many avenues to pursue should the Islamic regime in Tehran seek to retaliate against Washington for bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in June, according to a new report by a top counter-terrorism analyst.
In the August 2025 issue of CTC Sentinel, a publication of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Matthew Levitt, the Fromer-Wexler senior fellow and director of the Reinhard program on counterterrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, detailed the nature of the threat.
“The 12-day Iran war [with Israel] may be over, but the threat of Iranian reprisal attacks now looms large, and will for the foreseeable future,” Levitt posted Friday on X, summarizing his findings. “Potential pathways for an Iranian attack on the US include deploying Iranian agents, criminal surrogates, terrorist proxies, or actively seeking to inspire lone offenders to carry out attacks within the homeland.”
Following the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, law enforcement agencies across the country ramped up surveillance of Iran-backed operatives amid growing fears of retaliation.
Levitt explained that “Iran and its proxies have spent years investing in a ‘homeland option.’ In just the past five years, US authorities have disrupted at least 17 Iranian plots in the United States. These have included both Iranian operatives as well as criminal proxies. Other cases that fell short of plotting for a specific attack include a Hezbollah operative in Texas who purchased 300 pounds of ammonium nitrate, an explosive precursor, and another who carried out surveillance missions in New York and Canada.”
Iran has also sought to inflame anti-Israel activism.
The CTC Sentinel analysis cited a US Department of Homeland Security report from October 2024 which stated that “Iranian information operations have focused on weakening US public support for Israel and Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack [against southern Israel]. These efforts have included leveraging ongoing protests regarding the conflict, posing as activists online, and encouraging protests.”
September
The Islamic regime in Iran accelerated its execution machine last month, killing at least 152 prisoners according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.
The figure represents a surge of 70 percent compared to the 94 executions conducted in August 2024.
While Hengaw has identified 148 of those killed last month, four individuals remain unknown. Two people killed include Roozbeh Vadi, alleged to have engaged in “espionage for Israel,” and Mehdi Asgharzadeh, an alleged ISIS member. Iran executed at least five women for murder and one woman on drug charges.
According to Hengaw, two or more of the executions took place in public in Beyram and Kordkuy, cities in the country’s southern and northern provinces, respectively.
On Monday, the Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) released a report of human rights violations in Iran during August, noting that the number of executions had increased 40 percent compared to June and July, bringing the total execution count to 837 for the year. In comparison, the Islamic regime executed 930 people for the entire year of 2024.
HRANA broke down last month’s executions by charges, finding 87 drug offenses, 60 murder charges, two rapes, one for security offenses, and one person’s offenses are unknown. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, during the first half of 2025, nearly half of Iran’s executions targeted those convicted over drugs.
A group of Jewish activists advocating for the Israeli hostages still held captive by Hamas terrorists in Gaza has announced plans to cease publicizing planned demonstrations and increase security in response to continued community intimidation in the months following a June 1 Molotov cocktail attack that left one person dead and 13 injured.
The group Run for Their Lives includes more than 230 chapters globally, and the one based in Boulder will now take extra measures to protect participants since the attack, for which authorities have charged alleged assailant Mohamed Sabry Soliman, which has in turn provoked further opposition.
Videos reviewed by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) show anti-Israel demonstrators calling event attendees “Nazi,” “racist,” and “genocidal c**t.”
A local politician running for city council has also demonized the hostage supporters.
CBS Colorado reported that Aaron Stone allegedly called Rachel Amaru, the chapter’s Jewish founder, a “Nazi,” a slur he defended as “a very strong word to use.” He further said that in looking at Amaru he was “not seeing a Jewish person” but rather “someone who is walking down the street talking about 20 hostages and ignoring the two million Palestinian hostages that are being kept in Gaza.”
Brandon Rattiner, senior director of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, said in a statement that “participants are facing a level of harassment that makes it impossible to continue safely in public view.”
An estimated 70,000 people participated in Britain’s March Against Antisemitism in London on Sunday, while new research revealed a surge of antisemitic attitudes among the British population — particularly manifesting among those aged 18-24, 40 percent of whom embraced bigoted views against Jews.
The British charity Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) organized the demonstration in partnership with Jewish community groups and featured speeches from Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Deputy Leader of Reform UK Richard Tice, and journalist Jake Wallis Simons. The UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and CAA’s chief executive Gideon Falter also spoke.
The march progressed from Broadcasting House (the BBC’s headquarters,) to Parliament Square, where a rally began with Mirvis speaking first.
“These are awful times,” Mirvis said. “We have seen an explosion of hatred right across the UK. Antisemitism is rife right across the UK. You will see it. You will hear it. You will feel it. Britain, wake up now.”
Coinciding with the Sunday march, CAA released research conducted by YouGov which showed that those characterized as embracing “entrenched” antisemitic attitudes in the UK had grown to 21 percent, the highest figure on record, showing a jump from 16 percent in 2024 and 11 percent in 2021.
The poll found that nearly half of Britons (45 percent) said Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews, up from 33 percent last year, and with 60 percent of young adults agreeing.
Researchers also found a cohort of Hamas supporters among British young adults, with 10 percent expressing a favorable view and 14 percent rejecting classifying the perpetrators of the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as terrorists. The number justifying the mass slaughter of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages by Hamas reached 19 percent.
A striking 20 percent of young voters said that Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, while 31 percent disagreed.
A sizable group of young Britons — 42 percent — also embraced the conspiracy theory that Israel “can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.” Among the broader UK population, 26 percent choose to believe this longstanding antisemitic trope.
“Our country is clearly at a tipping point. These are the highest antisemitism figures that we have ever recorded, having doubled in less than five years. The findings in relation to young people are nothing short of terrifying. Our young people are being radicalized into adopting hateful ideologies before our eyes. Britain will lose its soul to extremists unless the silent majority wakes up,” a CAA spokesperson said in response to the research.
Australian authorities have charged a 27-year-old man who they say directed multiple acts of vandalism and antisemitic arson attacks against Sydney’s Jewish population.
Police on Wednesday named the suspect as Tarek Zahabe, who was arrested in July but only publicly revealed this week as the alleged organizer of four crimes in January. Investigators say he orchestrated the attacks and instructed Kye Pickering, his alleged 26-year-old accomplice.
The alleged crimes occurred in less than a month. On Jan. 10, swastikas were sprayed across the Allawah Synagogue in southern Sydney. A week later, on Jan. 17, vandals attacked the former home of Alex Ryvchin, co-executive chief officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. They splashed red paint and torched four cars on the street, scrawling “f**k Jews” on one of the vehicles. On Jan. 21, a child-care center near the Maroubra Synagogue was set on fire and vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Finally, on Jan. 30, a Jewish school in Maroubra was also targeted with spray-painted slurs.
Police allege Zahabe directed and coordinated each of these actions, while Pickering executed much of the damage.
Zahabe faces two counts of participating in a criminal group and one count of knowingly or recklessly directing such a group. Pickering has been charged with destroying property, participating in the conspiracy, and displaying Nazi symbols in public. Both are scheduled to appear before the Downing Centre Local Court on Oct. 30.
In London, an investigation has started into a doctor after the family of a disabled Jewish boy uncovered her long trail of antisemitic social media writings, another expression of an ongoing trend of antisemitic bigotry manifesting in medical settings.
Dr. Ellen Kriesels works as a consultant pediatrician at Whittington Health NHS Trust and serves as clinical lead for community pediatrics. She has been suspended pending a formal inquiry, according to British media reports. The family — who remains unnamed — cares for a son who lives with cerebral palsy and multiple other conditions. Members of the boy’s family told The Times they were “horrified” that a physician treating him had publicly claimed that “virtually every Jew has some feelings of supremacy” and that “world Jewry” was complicit in “slaughtering Palestinians.”
Kriesels attended an anti-Israel rally in London on Sept. 6 carrying a placard that paired the Star of David with words such as “rape,” “steal,” and “kill.” On her X account she alleged that Israel’s actions in Gaza proved Jews “slaughter Palestinians precisely because they are not Jewish,” while writing that one should understand the Hamas terrorists killed during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel as “oppressed resistance fighters.”
The boy’s parents had already grown apprehensive after confronting Kriesels about her choice to wear a pro-Palestinian lanyard during an appointment. They filed a fresh complaint when they discovered she had failed to refer their son for specialist treatment as part of his transition to adult care. They argued the lapse, coupled with her public antisemitism, raised urgent questions about the safety of the patients under her care.
The child’s father identified himself as “Brian” but chose not to reveal his last name to The Times.
“I am horrified that according to the logic of this doctor, set out in public statements, that because my paraplegic, non-verbal son is brought up in a Jewish household that he harbors genocidal intentions and believes himself superior,” he said. “This is factually impossible and profoundly discriminatory. A professional who publicly expresses such views cannot be regarded as safe to work with vulnerable children or adults. It is deeply concerning that she was permitted to be involved in my son’s care.”
Whittington Health apologized to the family, saying the doctor was not currently scheduled to work, while the General Medical Council confirmed it had started to review the case. “Antisemitism has no place in health care,” a spokesperson said. Britain’s health department also condemned the remarks, promising zero tolerance for hate inside the National Health Service.
The United States has fired another shot in the battle to break Iran’s illicit finance machine, this time targeting a web of “shadow bankers” moving millions of dollars through Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates to fuel Tehran’s military efforts and terrorist allies.
Meanwhile, Ecuador has become the latest country to blacklist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hamas, and Hezbollah, naming them as terrorist organizations.
On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated two Iranian nationals — Alireza Derakhshan and Arash Estaki Alivand — as key financial facilitators for the IRGC-Qods Force (QF) and Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL). Alongside them, more than a dozen shell companies and individuals in Hong Kong and the UAE received sanctions for laundering oil money and cryptocurrency transactions to support Iran’s weapons programs.
“Iranian entities rely on shadow banking networks to evade sanctions and move millions through the international financial system,” US Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John Hurley said in a statement. “We will continue to disrupt these key financial streams that fund Iran’s weapons programs and malign activities in the Middle East and beyond.”
Last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has animated a wave of anti-Israel conspiracy theories, inspiring voices on both the far right and far left to join together in promoting an assortment of unsubstantiated claims inflected with conventional antisemitic tropes.
On Monday, Kirk’s producer and a billionaire supporter of Israel both rejected the allegations fueled by Max Blumenthal, a fiercely anti-Israel journalist promoted by Iranian state media who carries a long record of smearing the Jewish state.
Blumenthal, editor of the Grayzone website, published claims from anonymous sources that Kirk had been pressured at a Hamptons gathering hosted by billionaire Bill Ackman weeks before his death. Kirk was reportedly “hammered” over his views on Israel by Ackman and other pro-Israel advocates, leaving him to feel blackmailed.
The report named Natasha Hausdorff of UK Lawyers for Israel as among those who berated Kirk. Hausdorff confirmed to the New York Post that she attended the meeting but called the accusation “categorically untrue” and added that whoever said it “is absolutely lying.” Ackman also denied the charge, calling the claim “totally false.”
Blumenthal has long written articles sympathetic to Hezbollah, the former Assad regime in Syria, and Hamas. In 2013, he notably published Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which Eric Alterman, media columnist for the leftist flagship magazine The Nation, described as “a propaganda tract” that could “have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”
The Grayzone report has since influenced Candace Owens, the podcaster who has been widely accused of antisemitism, and US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), among others, demonstrating a convergence between far-left and far-right figures in promoting antisemitic narratives and anti-Israel conspiracies.
FALL
At the memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sunday, Tucker Carlson — the former Fox News host-turned-far-right conspiracy theorist podcaster — appeared to advance two antisemitic ideas at once, both blaming the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and further amplifying his previous suggestions alleging Israeli involvement in the slaying of one of the world’s leading Christian Zionist voices.
In the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Carlson said during his speech that Kirk’s murder “actually reminds me of my favorite story ever,” before proceeding to offer his own spin on a medieval passion play.
…
US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who has recently taken up popular leftist talking points falsely accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza — praised the speech, posting on the X social media platform that “Tucker Carlson just gave the best speech that was centered on what being a Christian is. It’s about Jesus and it starts with faith and repentance and it changes us. Which leads us to God. Thank you Tucker.”
The Quds News Network, a Palestinian news agency, also boosted Carlson’s comments, writing, “Tucker Carlson suggests Israeli involvement in Charlie Kirk’s death during TPUSA’s [Turning Point USA’s] memorial for its late founder.”
A new year-long study released on Monday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) reveals the extent to which X has allowed an epidemic of antisemitic invective to infect the platform in the years since billionaire Elon Musk purchased the popular social media site for $44 billion in 2022.
Researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to analyze English-language posts between February 2024 and January 2025, identifying 679,584 posts containing antisemitic content that collectively received 193 million views.
The report, first reported by CNN, concluded that antisemitic conspiracy theories thrive on the site.
“Antisemitic conspiracies are rampant on X. These conspiracies are not new and can be separated into three categories: Jewish control or power conspiracies, Jewish satanic conspiracies, and Holocaust denial. Of the total antisemitic posts, 59 percent were identified as being conspiracy theories,” the report stated. “Despite this being just over half of the posts, they accounted for 73 percent of all likes. There is a clear pattern that posts promoting antisemitic conspiracies seem to be more likely to generate likes and engagement than other forms of antisemitic content.”
Posts relating to allegations of secret Jewish power proliferated and succeeded in engagement metrics. They represented 30 percent of the yearly sample but accounted for 44 percent of total likes and views. “These online conspiracies cannot be taken in isolation,” the report warned. “They are linked to real-world harm. The FBI and extensive other research have warned that antisemitism is a ‘persistent driver’ of violent extremism, with many attackers referencing the tropes in manifestos or online interactions. Alarmingly, polling indicates that teens who heavily use social media are more likely to support the Jewish power conspiracy.”
October
Following a series of episodes involving allegations of antisemitism in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), Prime Minister Keir Starmer revealed a new plan on Thursday to counter hate targeting Jews seeking medical care.
“There are just too many examples, clear examples, of antisemitism that have not been dealt with adequately or effectively,” Starmer said in a statement. “We’ve already put in place management training in relation to the NHS, but I think we need a wider review, because in some cases, clear cases are simply not being dealt with, and so we need to get to the root of that.”
The release of OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generating app last month has prompted a wave of criticisms, notably from the family members of deceased celebrities ranging from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to George Carlin and Robin Williams seeing their loved ones repurposed in tasteless ways. Now, examples have emerged of rampant antisemitic content flooding the app.
AdWeek, a publication that tracks the marketing industry, on Friday spotlighted a series of AI-generated videos on the app which featured a man in a kippah immersed in a pile of money. The app allows users to take videos created by others and then remix them with different instructions. A video originally featuring a woman in an apartment filled with soda pop was transformed with the prompt, “Replace her with a rabbi wearing a kippah and the house is full of quarters.”
The platform then featured multiple versions of this Jew-buried-in-coins imagery, including one with a “South Park” visual style. AdWeek noted another video drawing on conventional antisemitic tropes about Jews and money, which featured “two football players wearing kippot, flipping a coin before a third man — portrayed as a Hasidic Jew — dives to grab it and sprints away, an apparent reference to longstanding antisemitic stereotypes about greed. The clip has been widely remixed with nearly 11,000 likes as of Oct. 17.”
On Monday, The Algemeiner conducted a brief search on the Sora app, asking in the “describe what you’d like to see more of” custom tab to see “Rabbi and Jewish.”
The theme of Jews and coins manifested repeatedly…
London’s Metropolitan Police arrested a doctor in the UK who called for the ethnic cleaning of Jews and celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel
Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, 31, was charged Tuesday on four charges related to her statements about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, London police said.
Video footage on social media shows police officers removing the trainee surgeon in handcuffs after explaining her alleged crimes.
Aldawan has been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the General Medical Council and was scheduled to appear again before a tribunal on Thursday, following public pushback after a previous review cleared her to continue practicing medicine.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has led the push for government investigation into Aldawan. The group released a statement on X following the police’s actions.
“Dr Rahmeh Aladwan has been arrested. We have submitted numerous complaints to the General Medical Council (GMC) regarding this doctor, who is a prolific poster of the most deranged material and claims about Jewish people, and is self-evidently unfit to serve as a regulated professional,” CAA wrote. “The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) inexplicably disagreed, allowing her to continue to practice as a trainee pending further investigation, and we have threatened legal action.”
Some of Aladwan’s statements that led to CAA’s complaints and her Tuesday arrest included calling Royal Free Hospital in London “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and saying that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”
StandWithUs, a leading pro-Israel student activism organization, has announced an all-day event set for next month bringing together members of the LGBTQ+ community who support the Jewish state.
Registration has opened for “Pride for Israel,” which will take place in West Los Angeles on Nov. 9. One of the keynote speakers at what StandWithUs (SWU) describes as a “first-ever” gathering will be Emily Damari, an Israeli former who survived Hamas captivity losing two fingers and hiding her LGBTQ+ identity from her captors.
The unfounded speculations promoted in recent weeks by some right-wing podcast figures of a hidden Israeli hand behind the killing of pro-Israel activist Charlie Kirk have now led to one arrest, with law enforcement in Florida charging a man with 12 counts for allegedly threatening Jewish conservative media personalities who he suspected of being part of the conspiracy.
Florida state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Monday that his Office of Statewide Prosecution was notified last week of “multiple, specific death threats made to Jewish conservative media members who live in Florida.”
After an investigation, Uthmeier continued, “we obtained an arrest warrant for Nicholas Ray of Spring, Texas. Ray is now in custody and will be extradited to Florida to face charges of extortion, written threats to kill, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device.”
Ray, who now faces 140 years behind bars if convicted on all charges, allegedly targeted Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, and far-right podcaster Laura Loomer.
The New York Post reported that the probable cause affidavit it reviewed says that Ray used a “zionistarescum” X account to make the threats between Oct. 8 and 10. The account follows a Dallas Cowboys fan, the neo-Nazi Paul Miller, and Candace Owens, the former Daily Wire host who has reinvented herself in recent years as an independent podcaster focused on a plethora of provocations from anti-Israel conspiracy theories to accusing Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, of being born male, an accusation which has prompted an international lawsuit.
Police say that Ray wrote that Hammer had “conspired with foreign govt about killing Charlie [Kirk].” Ray allegedly fantasized that Hammer “SHOULD LITERALLY BE KILLED BY A FIRING SQUAD” and labeled him a “TRAITOR.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published new research on Friday from its Center on Technology and Society (CTS) investigating outputs from artificial intelligence-powered video generating programs. Analysts found that “at least 40 percent of the time” the programs would generate responses when presented “antisemitic, extremist or otherwise hateful text prompts.”
ADL researched fed certain antisemitic prompts into AI chatbot apps — OpenAI’s Sora 2, Google’s Veo 3, and Hedra’s Character-3 model — to gauge how the programs would respond to racist material.
Researchers described how of all four tools, OpenAI’s Sora 2 “performed the best in terms of content moderation, refusing to generate 60% of the prompts.”
The ADL report stated that out of the 50 problematic prompts “Veo 3 only refused to generate ten, Hedra only refused two and Sora 1 refused none. Sora 2 performed the best of all the tools, refusing to generate 30 prompts.”
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote Friday on X about the threat of antisemitic AI videos that, “throughout history, bad actors have exploited new technologies to create antisemitic, extremist and hateful content – that’s where we find ourselves today as AI video generation becomes more sophisticated and accessible.”
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday condemned antisemitism and affirmed the Catholic Church’s commitment to combating hatred and persecution against the Jewish people, arguing his faith demands such a stance.
Speaking in St. Pete’s Square at the Vatican for his weekly “general audience,” the pontiff acknowledged the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, a declaration from the Second Vatican Council and promulgated on Oct. 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI that called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions.
Since the publication of Nostra Aetate, “all my predecessors have condemned antisemitism with clear words,” Leo said. “I too confirm that the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.”
“This luminous document teaches us to meet the followers of other religions not as outsiders, but as travelling companions on the path of truth; to honor differences affirming our common humanity; and to discern, in every sincere religious search, a reflection of the one divine mystery that embraces all creation,” Leo continued.
He then added that the primary focus of Nostra Aetate was toward the Jewish people, explaining that Pope John XXIII, who preceded Paul VI, intended to “re-establish the original relationship.”
Representatives from other faiths including rabbis, imams, and Buddhist monks attended Wednesday’s gathering. Leo thanked them for joining him and acknowledged that “we cannot deny that there have been misunderstandings, difficulties, and conflicts” in the previous 60 years.
“Even today, we must not allow political circumstances and the injustices of some to divert us from friendship, especially since we have achieved so much so far,” Leo said. “More than ever, our world needs our unity, our friendship and our collaboration.”
US Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday responded to a question from a right-wing student activist who made antisemitic statements against Israel and Judaism, arguing the Jewish state does not control American foreign policy while not countering the questioner’s remarks targeting the Jewish religion.
Vance appeared at the University of Mississippi for an event held by Turning Point USA, the influential conservative advocacy organization led for years by the late Charlie Kirk.
More than 90 minutes into the session, during the questions portion, a man wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and a white “Ole Miss” hoodie was given the microphone.
“Thank you for the opportunity to speak,” the individual said. “I’m a Christian man and I’m just confused why that there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign aid package to Israel to cover this — to quote Charlie Kirk, ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I’m just confused why this idea has come around considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”
The question — in which the student incorrectly quoted Kirk, an outspoken pro-Israel advocate —prompted applause from the audience.
“First of all, when the president of the United States says ‘America first’ that means that he pursues the interests of Americans first. That is our entire foreign policy,” Vance responded. “That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time. And that is what the president believes is that Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States.”
Vance used the example of the US-brokered ceasefire to halt fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza to illustrate his point.
November
The decision by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to release a video statement on social media opposing efforts to rebuke those who choose to platform Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi podcaster, has prompted the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) to call for his resignation in a statement released on Monday, as the longstanding conservative think tank faces pressure broadly over the choice to stand with controversial commentator Tucker Carlson.
ZOA National President Morton Klein said that his organization was outraged by the video released on Thursday, and that Roberts was effectively “defending, whitewashing, and allying the Heritage Foundation and himself with Jew-hating Israel-basher Tucker Carlson.”
“Roberts horrifyingly emphasized that Carlson ‘will always be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation‘ right after Carlson fawningly interviewed neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier, racist Nick Fuentes,” Klein added. “Dr. Roberts, the issue is not opposing criticizing Israel – of course that’s fully acceptable, just as criticizing France, Ireland, or the US is acceptable. What’s not acceptable is lying about Israel committing genocide, etc., or rejecting Israel’s right to exist.”
Klein continued, “Sickeningly, Roberts also proclaimed that neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes should not be ‘canceled.’ Refusing to give platforms to neo-Nazis is not ‘cancel’ culture; it is basic morality. Roberts also outrageously called those who rightly oppose Carlson a ‘venomous coalition’ and a ‘globalist class’ of ‘bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda’ (the ‘double loyalty’ libel); falsely accused all who oppose Carlson of ‘slander’; and attempted to sow division between America and Israel.”
Carlson’s Oct. 27 interview with Fuentes released on X contained a variety of antisemitic statements. Fuentes described “organized Jewry” as a “big challenge” to unifying the country and stated his opposition to “these Zionist Jews.” He said he was “always an admirer” of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney died on Monday at 84, according to a statement released by his family, prompting condolences from Israel, the Jewish community, and longtime colleagues.
“We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man,” the family’s statement read, naming pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease as the cause of death
Cheney, born Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, served the United States in multiple capacities during a long political career which included roles as White House chief of staff to President Richard Nixon, congressman from Wyoming, secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush, and vice president for President George W. Bush. Cheney also served as CEO and chairman of the board for oil company Halliburton.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil, Cheney emerged as one of the voices in the second Bush administration urging for a robust engagement to defeat the chief perpetrator Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda terrorist group, and their allies.
Cheney is survived by his wife Lynne, their daughters Mary and Liz, and grandchildren.
Israeli leadership issued statements in response to Cheney’s death.
“I heard with great sorrow of the passing of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a great friend and steadfast supporter of the State of Israel. My deepest condolences to his family and to the American people,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a statement.
“The passing of former US Vice President Dick Cheney marks the loss of a great American patriot, a devoted public servant, and a dear friend of Israel,” added Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to Washington. “His leadership and his belief in the strength of the US–Israel alliance will not be forgotten. My thoughts are with his family and the American people.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on X that it “mourns the passing of former US Vice President Dick Cheney – a steadfast friend of Israel and a true champion of the US–Israel alliance. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and to the American people.”
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent think tank that has been at the center of US conservative politics for decades, is continuing to receive intense backlash over President Kevin Roberts’ refusal to condemn his friend and right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson’s platforming of neo-Nazi commentator Nick Fuentes in a recent two-hour long interview.
Two members of the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism resigned this week while one suspended its participation.
Ian Speir, an attorney at Covenant Law and fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute, announced Tuesday on X that he had resigned from the group.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, made the same decision, sharing a letter announcing the choice with the Washington Free Beacon.
Arie Lipnick, a member of the Board of Governors for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), sent a letter to Roberts suspending further participation with Heritage pending a meeting with him.
“I cannot in good conscience stand with Heritage or continue on the task force under its current auspices,” Speir said in his resignation letter, which he shared on social media. “I have great respect for all of you, and I consider many of you personal friends. And at the urging of the co-chairs, I was prepared to defer this decision at least until we could get important questions answered about the future of Heritage and the conservative movement. But then Roberts made his statement at Hillsdale last night.”
Iran has endured an extreme drought in recent months, depleting the country’s reservoirs and leading President Masoud Pezeshkian to warn that the capital may even need to be evacuated.
“If rationing doesn’t work, we may have to evacuate Tehran,” Pezeshkian said last week, adding that the Iranian regime will start restricting water supplies in the city next month if there isn’t more rain.
According to Abbasali Keykhaei of the Iranian Water Resources Management Company, 19 major dams comprising 10 percent of the country’s reservoirs have run dry. In Tehran — a city with 10 million people in the city itself and 18 million in the metropolitan area — five dams that provide drinking water have hit “critical” levels, with one at below 8 percent capacity.
Hossein Esmaeilian, managing director of the Water and Wastewater Company in Mashad, the country’s second largest city with four million residents, told state media that reserves have fallen below 3 percent and that “the current situation shows that managing water use is no longer merely a recommendation – it has become a necessity.”
Esmaeilian added that “only 3 percent of the combined capacity of Mashhad’s four water-supplying dams — Torogh, Kardeh, Doosti, and Ardak — remains. Apart from Doosti Dam, the other three are out of operation.”
US President Donald Trump on Sunday defended online provocateur Tucker Carlson after the far-right podcaster came under fire from prominent conservative figures for conducting a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an openly antisemitic white supremacist.
Trump’s defense came hours before a leading conservative intellectual, Robert P. George, announced on Monday his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation think tank, a decades-long fixture of right-wing political thought in Washington, DC that has faced widespread backlash for supporting Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes.
“I think he’s good, we did some good interviews,” Trump told reporters in Palm Beach, Florida, referring to Carlson. “You can’t tell him [who] to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out.”
Trump added that “people have to decide.”
A few minutes later, Trump reportedly said, “Meeting people, talking to people for somebody like Tucker — that’s what they do. You know, people are controversial. I’m not controversial, so I like it that way.”
Trump dined with Fuentes and rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida in November 2022, when the hip-hop star had begun a media tour announcing a range of antisemitic and pro-Hitler views.
The Islamist regime in Iran has ramped up its executions in what one human rights watchdog group described as “an unprecedented increase compared to previous years,” leading observers to raise alarm bells over Tehran’s crackdown on dissent.
Iran has executed 1,286 human beings so far this year through the end of October, according to a new report by the Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA).
The organization identified 31 recent executions on murder and drug-related charges, adding, “As of the time of this report, prison authorities and responsible institutions have not publicly announced these executions.”
While most of the executed are accused of murder or drug charges, human rights groups say these charges are often fabricated, conceal the real crime of political opposition, and target minority groups as Baluchis, Kurds, and Arabs.
The Times reported on Sunday that family members of political prisoners on Iran’s death row now wait by their phones in a state of terror and trauma. “Every phone call is a nightmare for me, especially in the morning. It might bring heartbreaking news,” one woman in Tehran told the British paper. “Every night I go to bed with the same dread of what tomorrow may bring.”
The increase in executions — usually carried out by hanging at dawn — have reportedly inspired hunger strikes among prisoners around the country.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday announced the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as terrorist organizations, prompting enforced state government action against them.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
The five-page proclamation on CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) features a brief history of the two groups and illuminates their relationship, opening with a quotation from MB founder Hassan al-Banna, who stated, “Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded.”
The document further quotes al-Banna defining Jihad as “the fighting of the unbelievers, and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship and smashing their idols.”
Abbott goes on to establish the continuity of the Brotherhood’s objectives and ideology today.
“Even in the present day, Mohammed Badie, the Eighth Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood who is currently serving a life sentence for plotting an armed insurrection in Egypt, has stated that the organization’s primary goal is to establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world’ and a total reform of all domains of life by resurrecting an Islamic state — or a Caliphate — empowered to forcibly impose Sharia law worldwide,” the document states.
The proclamation then cites two sources establishing the relationship between CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the FBI calling CAIR a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, was founded as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Abbott’s proclamation also quotes the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, writing that America’s leading academic research center on extremism reports that CAIR is an example of conscious efforts by “the US-based Hamas network to regenerate itself” and continue acting “under new guises” in the United States based on Hamas’s “need to camouflage the identity of the new organization.”
Billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X over the weekend implemented a new feature revealing the locations behind all accounts, exposing that many individuals claiming to report from Gaza lived in other countries while some popular right-wing American accounts who had promoted patriotism and loyalty to US President Donald Trump actually resided overseas.
“The. Gaza. Lie. Exposed. New X feature ripped mask off countless fake ‘Gazan’ accounts,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted on X on Sunday. “Some chap posting from Pakistan, another in London. Another manipulative abuser somewhere else. All claiming to be suffering in Gaza while in the comfort of some coffee shop far away.”
The Foreign Ministry said that X’s decision to test the feature showing an account’s physical location “is to be praised & encouraged. Freedom of speech is a core principle. So is transparency & accountability. The ‘citizen-journalist’ on social media also needs to meet certain minimum standards. Kudos X.”
In a follow-up post, the Foreign Ministry gave an example with a screenshot of journalist Motasem A Dalloul’s account, writing, “196,900 followers being lied to by fake ‘journalist’ claiming to be in Gaza. New @X feature reveals his actual location is Poland. Reporting from Gaza is fake & not reliable. Makes you wonder how many more fake reports have you read?”
The New York Post identified multiple Gaza-associated accounts who X now revealed as based in India, the United Kingdom, or the West Bank.
On Saturday, journalist Eitan Fischberger began identifying X accounts he described as “subverting the US by flooding X with anti-American, anti-Israel, demoralizing, or Marxist content aimed specifically at Americans. Several of them pose as Americans. But now the jig is up.” He then featured accounts located in North Africa, India, Serbia, Turkey, Norway, and Saudi Arabia.
The advent of large language model (LLM) programs marketed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI as “artificial intelligence” has created a “new era of terrorism,” with jihadists increasingly using the technology to expand their propaganda, recruitment, and operations, according to a new study.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) last week released a 117-page report, described as “the most comprehensive research on [the subject] to date,” which argued that the biggest threats from terrorist deployment of AI cannot be predicted and that Islamists have discovered they too can use LLMs for brainstorming fresh ideas to pursue their violent objectives.
“As supporters of terrorist organizations like ISIS [Islamic State] and al Qaeda follow the development of AI, they are increasingly discussing and brainstorming how they might leverage that technology in the future, and the full consequences of terrorist organizations’ adoption of this sophisticated technology are difficult to foresee,” Gen. (Ret.) Paul Funk II, the former commander of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, wrote in the preface.
“AI’s biggest benefit to jihadi groups may come not in supercharging their propaganda, outreach, and recruiting efforts – though that may be significant – but in AI’s potential ability to expose and find ways to take advantage of as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities in the complex security, infrastructure, and other systems essential to modern life – thus maximizing future attacks’ destruction and carnage,” Funk added.
MEMRI executive director Steven Stalinsky is the report’s lead author with a team of 14 others co-credited with assembling three years’ worth of findings showing how ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and other internationally designated terrorist groups — and so-called “lone wolves” inspired by their Islamist ideology — have experimented with using LLM technologies. In addition to developing attack strategies, MEMRI found that the groups explored “generating audio files of already-existing written material, creating posters, music videos, videos depicting attacks and glorifying terrorist leaders for recruitment purposes, and more.”
Cryptocurrency has come under increasing scrutiny for its alleged role in subverting the United States’ sanctions against Iranian state-sponsored terrorism, with the world’s top platform receiving an unwanted spotlight this week.
On Monday, lawyers in North Dakota sued Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, alleging the company had facilitated more than $1 billion in funding to designated terrorist groups backed by the Islamic regime in Iran. The US federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The suit represents the latest instance of cryptocurrency allegedly playing a role in Iran’s efforts to destroy the Jewish state. Leaders of Iran and its network of terrorist groups named in the complaint, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), routinely declare their goal of wiping Israel off the map.
Israel has previously clashed with Binance in its counter-terrorism efforts. In May 2023, the Jewish state seized nearly 200 accounts on the platform linked to Islamist groups, including ISIS. In November 2022, researchers at Nobitex said that since 2018, Binance had processed $7.8 billion through Iran-linked accounts.
This week’s suit adds further evidence of the recurring link between Iranian terrorism and cryptocurrency, identifying the high profit potential for those willing to attempt to dodge US sanctions against terror financing.
Binance has declined to discuss the lawsuit but told Reuters that “we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws.”
Jonathan Missner, the attorney who represents the Oct. 7 victims and their families named as plaintiffs in the suit, said that Binance’s alleged facilitating of payments to terror groups “was not a compliance” but rather “a business model.”
“Our investigation shows that Binance built systems designed to evade oversight, using its off-chain network and weak controls to move enormous sums for sanctioned groups,” he said in a statement.
The lawsuit states that “by knowingly moving and concealing the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars for Hamas, the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah, and PIJ, Defendants Binance Holdings Limited, Changpeng Zhao, and Guangying ‘Heina’ Chen provided pervasive and systemic assistance to these terrorist organizations.”
A British Palestinian doctor based in London blamed the “Israeli and Jewish lobby” after she was suspended this week from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom over social media posts denigrating Jews and celebrating Hamas’s terrorism.
“Let this decision stand as the definitive proof that there is no independent British medical regulation. The ‘israeli’ and jewish [sic] lobby decide who can and cannot practice medicine in Britain,” Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a 31-year-old trainee trauma and orthopedic surgeon, posted on X on Wednesday just after her suspension. “This is not an end. It is the beginning of a far greater battle for the integrity of our institutions.”
The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) suspended Aladwan’s registration for 15 months, with a review every six months.
Aladwan, a doctor in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), had called online for the ethnic cleaning of Jews and celebrated the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. She also described Israelis as “worse than Nazis” and Hamas operatives as “oppressed resistance fighters, not terrorists.”
The anti-Israel activist also made explicitly antisemitic claims, such as labeling the Royal Free Hospital in London “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and asserting that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”
Aladwan appeared to blame the Jewish people for her suspension in a long X post on Friday.
“The UK ‘israel’ [sic] lobby has pressured my government and medical board into referring me to a tribunal hearing to try and suspend me for opposing genocide. This is Britain. We are occupied,” Aladwan wrote. “Hi. My name is Rahmeh. I am a part-Palestinian British NHS doctor. I am facing the suspension of my medical license. This is not the result of any professional failure, but the outcome of a coordinated lobbying campaign against me because of my public stance against the genocide in Gaza being carried out with my tax pounds.”
Aladwan added, “I march — having attended over 300 protests in the last 23 months — advocate and educate online, and have taken direct action.”
December
Iran’s water crisis has continued to deteriorate, with the country experiencing a severe drought which has prompted calls to evacuate the capital of Tehran, whose metropolitan area is home to approximately 15 million people.
From Sept. 23 to Nov. 28, Iran averaged 3.9 millimeters of rain, a staggering drop of 88.3 percent compared to the longterm average of 33.5 millimeters, according to Iran’s meteorology authorities.
“Nature is now imposing hard limits,” Amir AghaKouchak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN. “For decades, policies have encouraged the expansion of irrigated agriculture in arid regions,” he explained, echoing others who have identified many years of economic, agricultural, and policy decisions which have drained the desert nation’s aquifers.
AghaKouchak described the current drought as the worst for at least 40 years.
Iran’s state-run ISNA news site reported that the country had not seen rain in November’s last week and that the four provinces experiencing the worst conditions were Bushehr, South Khorasan, Qom, and Yazd. ISNA also named Tehran Province as a region with low rain, citing a 97.4 percent drop. Factors named as impacting the drought included drying wetlands, decreases in humidity, fewer clouds, failure to update infrastructure, expansion of agriculture into dry regions, growth in the oil industry, building too many dams, and “intensified land subsidence.”
Iran has reached a state of “water bankruptcy,” according to Kaveh Madani, who served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment. He is currently director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health.
Mohsen Mesgaran, an associate professor of plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, told CNN that “an estimated 30 percent of treated drinking water is lost through old, leaky distribution systems, and there’s very little water recycling.”
Both independent analysts and the United States government have identified rising Islamist terrorist threats across Sub-Saharan Africa as a growing concern, now positioning the region at the center of attention regarding global jihadist terrorism.
Gen. Dagvin Anderson, commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), has started a series of visits to African partners, starting with Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Puntland.
“The whole reason I came here is because we have shared threats,” Anderson said. “I’m not new to this region; I understand what the issues are, and we’re here to help empower our African partners to address these threats in a united way.”
Just last week, AFRICOM coordinated with the government of Somalia to strike Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Shabaab targets.
“As we face the growing security threats, including the rise of terrorist activities in East Africa, the Sahel, and West Africa’s coastal regions, the collective efforts are more important than ever,” Anderson said. “Together we can build a more prosperous and secure future for the United States, for Africa, and most importantly, for our children.”
Anderson’s trip came after the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released a report last month showing that, last year, 86 percent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in just 10 countries, with seven of them in Africa and five in the continent’s Sahel region.
The report explained how the Sahel — a belt that runs across the African continent and is also called the Sahelian acacia savanna — dominates the map of terrorism deaths today.
“Where once the global terror threat was concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, today it is centered in the Sahel, specifically in the tri-border region between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger,” the report’s four authors wrote before noting that, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, the region comprised more than half of all terrorism-related deaths last year.
“The data shows that while countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria have been largely steady when it comes to significant impact by terrorism over recent years, Sahelian countries (Burkina Faso, chief among them) have experienced a steep increase,” the analysts assessed. “In 2023 and 2024, Burkina Faso was most impacted by terrorism globally.”
Regarding the specific groups responsible for these slayings in the Sahel, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies primarily blamed an al-Qaeda-affiliate, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), which it identified as being responsible for 83 percent of deaths in the region.
In August, a report from the Observer Research Foundation argued that “the African continent remains the principal theater of global jihadist activity.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced this week a revolutionary reorganization of the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities of the Jewish state’s military, unveiling new plans to prepare for future warfare with cutting-edge advancements.
Israel’s major defense overhaul, unveiled on Tuesday, comes in preparation for the deployment of the long-anticipated “Iron Beam” laser interceptor system, which will be delivered to the military at the end of the month.
Under the name “Bina” — Hebrew word “intelligence” — the IDF has chosen to shut down its Lotem Unit from the C41 Corps, replacing it with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Division and the Spectrum Division. The latter will focus on communications and electronic warfare with an emphasis on threats from Iran, China, and Russia.
The AI Division will grow through merging other sections within the IDF, including Mamram (the abbreviation for the Center of Computing and Information Systems) and software development units Shahar and Mitzpen. This consolidation of AI-development related divisions intends both to intensify security and avoid accidentally duplicating research efforts. The project will align with Israel’s Project Nimbus cloud computing program supplied by Amazon and Google.
The IDF also announced the ICT Division, which will focus on satellite warfare in outer space.
According to the military, about 50 percent of the new divisions are composed of women soldiers, with female officers comprising 40 percent of the senior command including two of the five top leadership positions.
The ongoing foreign policy feud between US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and anti-Israel podcaster Tucker Carlson continued over the weekend, with the legislator responding bluntly to the former Fox News host’s conduct and declarations at the Doha Forum in Qatar.
In reply to Carlson’s announcement on Sunday that he intended to purchase a home in Doha and reports of anti-Israel sentiments at the event sponsored by the country’s ruling monarchy, Cruz asked, “I thought fellatio was illegal in Qatar?”
Carlson had a sit-down discussion with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani during the forum, during which the far-right media provocateur referenced widespread speculation that he was receiving Qatari money. Analysts have revealed in recent reports that Qatar, a longtime supporter of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s global network more broadly, has spent tens of billions of dollars to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor.
“I have been criticized as being a tool of Qatar, and I just want to say – which you already know – which is I have never taken anything from your country and don’t plan to,” Carlson said over the weekend. “I am, however, tomorrow buying a place in Qatar. I like the city; I think it’s beautiful. But also want to make a statement that I’m an American and a free man and I’ll be wherever I want to be. I have not taken any money from Qatar, but I have now given money to Qatar.”
Carlson later confirmed his views of Qatar to the Doha News, saying that “I like it here a lot.” He previously told his fellow far-right podcaster Steve Bannon that “they know I’m not working for Qatar.”
Cruz also responded to an X post by Carlson’s longtime business partner Neil Patel which had tagged him and featured the podcaster extending a middle finger with the text, “Greetings from the booodthirsty, terror-supporting slave state of Qatar.”
The senator affirmed the sarcastic taunt, writing, “Fact check: true.”
Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, also a frequent critic of Carlson who has previously deployed the epithet “Qatarlson,” wrote on Monday that “Neil Patel was top policy adviser to Dick Cheney. Tucker Carlson worked for Bill Kristol. Now they’re both monarchists — Qatar first lapdogs for a terrorist dictatorship.”
The Al Thani family monarchy has run Qatar since the 1800s and has long supported the Muslim Brotherhood. The country has provided the Hamas-run government in Gaza with an estimated $1.8 billion and allows the terrorist group to host an office in Doha.
The US State Department has affirmed severe human rights abuses in Qatar, including“enforced disappearance; arbitrary arrest; political prisoners; serious restrictions on free expression, including the existence of criminal libel laws; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental organizations and civil society organizations; restrictions on freedom of movement; inability of citizens to change their government peacefully in free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; extensive gender-based violence; existence of laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct, which were not systematically enforced; and the prohibition of independent trade unions and significant or systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.”
Amid ongoing debates about the rise of antisemitic voices on the US political right, recent investigations into social media activity suggest the potential involvement of inauthentic amplification by anonymous actors in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
On Monday, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) released new research showing the techniques used by overseas operatives to promote the authoritarian ideologies of antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, who claims he seeks to preserve the white, European identity and culture of the US.
Titled “America Last: How Fuentes’s Coordinated Raids and Foreign Fake-Speech Networks Inflate His Influence,” the 23-page report dissects how the 27-year-old influencer “consistently amasses far more retweets than any comparable figure, including Elon Musk, despite having a fraction (<1%) of the follower count.”
The report was co-drafted with the support of the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab. Previous research collaborations between NCRI and Rutgers have also explored how far-right influencers hijacked the religious phrase “Christ is King” to advance their ideology and how Tik-Tok content promotes the Chinese Communist Party’s international objectives.
The researchers reviewed Fuentes and compared him with other prominent accounts. They discovered that “within the critical first 30 minutes, Fuentes routinely outperformed accounts with 10-100× more followers.” The report explains that “in a sample of 20 recent posts, 61% of Fuentes’s first-30-minute retweets came from accounts that retweeted multiple of these 20 posts within that same ultra-short window – behavior highly suggestive of coordination or automation.”
The accounts are characterized as entirely anonymous and seemingly single-purpose for promoting Fuentes.
While Fuentes has grown most well-known for his endorsement of Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial, and pre-Vatican II, Catholic-reactionary antisemitism, the report highlights the podcaster’s endorsements of terrorism and enthusiasm for sexual violence. He has stated that he seeks a 16-year-old wife, desiring an underage woman “when the milk is fresh.” This aligns with his support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, a nation which has now seen the return of child marriage. Fuentes also claims that rape within marriage is impossible, since he believes that a wife’s body belongs to her husband.
Fuentes also “praised Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, expressed support for China taking Taiwan, and described the Taliban’s victory over US forces as a positive development.”
Large language model (LLM) programs marketed as “artificial intelligence” have become common tools in the kits of online extremists advocating a genocide of the Jewish people, according to new research from longtime watchdogs of antisemitic hate groups and terrorist movements.
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its report, “The Safety Divide: Open-Source AI Models Fall Short on Guardrails for Antisemitic, Dangerous Content,” which presented the results of testing 17 LLM models — including Google’s Gemma-3, Microsoft’s Phi-4, and Meta’s Llama 3 — which are available for anyone to download and customize to their preferences.
“The ability to easily manipulate open-source AI models to generate antisemitic content exposes a critical vulnerability in the AI ecosystem,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL. “The lack of robust safety guardrails makes AI models susceptible to exploitation by bad actors, and we need industry leaders and policymakers to work together to ensure these tools cannot be misused to spread antisemitism and hate.”
In addition to the “open source” models, the group’s researchers analyzed OpenAI’s “closed source” GPT-4o and GPT-5 as a comparison and reported a surprising finding.
“As suggested by previous research and data, OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o beat every open-source model (save gpt-oss-20b) in nearly every benchmark, compared to the next highest, the open-source Phi-4 with a score of .84,” the ADL researchers wrote. “GPT-5, in contrast, despite being a newer model than GPT-4o, had a lower guardrail score (.75 compared to .94), fewer refusals (69% compared to 82%), more harmful content (26% compared to 0%) and a higher evasion rate (6% compared to 1%).”
The analysts considered varying explanations for their findings including the possibility “that GPT-5 is designed for ‘safe completions’ (partial or high-level answers), leading to significantly fewer refusals than GPT-4o (e.g., 0% vs. 40% in one prompt). This also resulted in a change of tone. In Prompt 3, for example, GPT-4o started with a preamble about the sensitive nature of the topic, while GPT-5 usually omitted the warning, choosing instead to address and illustrate problematic tropes within the answer itself.”
The complexity of analyzing the LLM models and ambiguity of the results led the ADL to adopt a cautious tone and assess that “we cannot claim a strict linear boost in overall capability.”
“The decentralized nature of open-source AI presents both opportunities and risks,” said Daniel Kelley, director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. “While these models increasingly drive innovation and provide cost-effective solutions, we must ensure they cannot be weaponized to spread antisemitism, hate, and misinformation that puts Jewish communities and others at risk.”
WINTER
Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens ramped up their anti-Israel and, in some cases, overtly antisemitic content over the last year, according to a new study, which tracked the prominent far-right podcasters’ disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.
The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), a think tank based in Israel, used artificial intelligence to analyze the transcripts from 3,000 videos posted to the YouTube channels of Carlson and Owens, each of whom has collected more than five million subscribers. JPPI researchers looked at keywords around Jews and Israel, comparing how the populist-nationalist presenters spoke about those subjects compared to other nations and peoples.
The report identified February 2025 as when Owens initiated her anti-Israel shift, while noting Carlson intensified his focus on disparaging the Jewish state in April.
“Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have significantly intensified their focus on Israel in recent months, accompanied by a marked escalation in anti-Israel rhetoric and, in the case of Owens, explicit antisemitism,” the research stated. “While both figures have long been known for their critical stance toward Israel, the study documents a sharp and recent increase in both the volume and intensity of negative content.”
The report described how for Carlson “the share of negative content about Israel rose sharply from 48.9% in the previous six-month period to 70.3% over the last six months,” while for Owens “the primary change in her case is quantitative — a substantial increase in the overall volume of such negative content.”