On the Wrong Kind of Antisemitism

I used to wonder whether people would have cared more about Colleyville if a Jew had been killed; October 7th proved that they would not have.

On January 15, 2022, 44-year-old Malik Akram, armed with a pistol, entered Temple Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. Akram held Rabbi Cytron Walker and three congregants hostage in an intense eleven-hour standoff. The peaceful Shabbat morning services quickly turned into a nightmare. Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the service was live-streamed, capturing much of the ordeal. Remote congregants could do nothing but watch in despair, knowing their community’s fate lay in the hands of a deranged attacker. 

Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who is serving an 86-year sentence in federal prison for attempting to murder American troops in Afghanistan. The media dubbed Siddiqui “Lady Al Qaeda” for her close ties to the terrorist organization. Siddiqui appeared on the FBI's most wanted list for several years but was arrested and detained by Afghan police on a separate matter. A search of her handbag revealed numerous documents describing the creation of explosives, descriptions of US landmarks, and substances that were sealed in glass bottles and jars. The following day, a detained Siddiqui seized the rifle of a warrant officer and fired two shots at US military personnel. Needless to say, these are severe crimes. Yet, Akram targeted a synagogue because he wholeheartedly believed that Jews have the power to pardon convicted terrorists. Akram’s plan was to have Rabbi Cytron-Walker contact a fictitious “Chief Rabbi of America'' who would use his influence to arrange Siddiqui’s release in exchange for the hostages. 

When news broke of the hostage crisis, progressives immediately jumped into action; they took to social media to announce their shock, anger, and concern over rising antisemitism. This was, of course, before any details about the assailant emerged. The only information released at that point was of an armed man holding hostages in a synagogue. LGBTQ influencer Matt Bernstein posted a Twitter thread blaming the attack on conservatives, mentioning Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bizarre claim that a “Jewish Space Laser” ignited the California wildfires and anti-vaxxers comparing their “plight” under COVID restrictions to that of Jews living under Nazi rule. After discovering that the hostage taker was actually an Islamist, Bernstein deleted his tweets, which is pretty ironic considering he wrote, “this [siege] is what happens when we stay silent about antisemitism, letting it evolve and grow like a virus in the gross petri dish that is America.” After deleting his tweets about the importance of speaking out, Bernstein’s passion for fighting antisemitism waned for a few months. Of course, it reemerged when denouncing antisemitism was back ‘in’ after Kanye West’s antisemitic tweets, but more on that later.

Once details about Akram emerged, concern for the Jews held at gunpoint completely dissipated. In a world where oppression - whether actual or perceived - serves as social currency, the morality of denouncing antisemitism depends on the identity of the antisemite. When the hostage-taker was a white supremacist, denouncing his crimes was a moral duty. Now that he was an Islamist, it was Islamophobic. But it was too late for many leftists who had already tweeted about the ‘wrong kind of antisemitism,’ so they shifted to damage control. Many opted to share a tweet from author Wajahat Ali warning, “You’re about to hear some ugly and vicious Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry this weekend…people will use it to divide Jewish and Muslim communities…don’t fall for it.”

I can only assume that Ali was concerned about an impending PR crisis for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which had a history of championing Aafia Siddiqui’s release – the same cause that motivated Akram’s attack. In fact, just one month prior, CAIR’s Texas chapter hosted an event to raise awareness about Siddiqui’s case. It certainly did not help that Siddiqui is wildly antisemitic. During her trial, Siddiqui gained notoriety for several antisemitic stunts such as refusing to cooperate with Jewish lawyers, insisting her prosecution was part of a Jewish conspiracy, demanding no Jews be allowed to serve on the jury, and requesting that jurors undergo DNA testing to prove they weren’t Jewish. Still, since Siddiqui was not a tiki torch-carrying skinhead, so who cares?

Nine months after the attack on Temple Beth Israel, Kanye West’s antisemitic outbursts presented leftists with a new opportunity to condemn anti-Jewish hatred. It turned out that threatening to go “death con [sic] 3” on Jews was not socially acceptable. Shortly thereafter, a viral post reading “I support my Jewish friends and the Jewish people'' swept through Instagram. Soon, every celebrity reposted “I support the Jewish people” to prove that they definitely were not antisemitic. Less than a year later, on October 7th, 2023, Jewish people would suffer the deadliest massacre since the Holocaust. To nobody’s surprise, self-proclaimed allies who swore they “support[ed] the Jewish people” were completely silent. I was not surprised that celebrities’ “support for Jews” did not extend to Jewish families who were slaughtered in their homes. I was, however, shocked to discover that concern for women’s issues like misogyny and sexism was just as much of a farce. The “fight” against antisemitism was as legitimate as the “fight” against misogyny. 

During the Holocaust, the Nazi regime undertook extensive efforts to destroy evidence of their crimes against humanity, indicating at least some level of shame. This time, our tormentors strapped cameras to their bodies because they wanted to show the world exactly what they did – much of which constituted gender-based violence. Yet, feminists were nowhere to be found. The world watched as Hamas slaughtered over 1200 people and abducted 250 more. Nobody was spared: not young mothers with their infants, not the elderly, not the disabled, not even Arab or Muslim Israelis. In a video proudly shared by Mohammed El Kurd, we see grown men snickering while driving away with Yaffa Adar, an 85-year-old woman they’d taken hostage.  The endless stream of footage was horrifying; each video somehow worse than the last. Then came the girls…

Etched into our collective memory is a ten-second video of Naama Levy’s abduction. As  Naama’s attacker drags her into a vehicle by her hair, the clip shows that her achilles tendons were sliced open and her sweatpants were soaked in blood, indicating violent sexual torture. She was shoved into a Jeep while civilians cheered and chanted “Allahu Akbar.” This should have outraged feminists worldwide. It didn’t. Instead, people opted to perform a blood spatter analysis on Naama’s sweatpants. 

 

Instagram-famous OBGYN,  Dr. Hina Cheema wrote: “The stain on the backside shows a blood loss of 150-180 ml of dried blood. If blood is coming from your vagina, it will stain the crotch and inner thighs and trickle down legs if you're standing. And the crotch and back of your pants if you're sitting down. The inner crotch and thigh area of her pants is unstained..“ Anyone who’s experienced a menstrual cycle will tell you that this is demonstrably false.

Another clip shows an unconscious Shani Louk, lying face down in the back of a truck. She is surrounded by her unbothered captors, who laughed and smiled while joyfully parading her lifeless body around Gaza. Her clothes were torn, and her legs were contorted into multiple directions; her kneecaps clearly dislocated. Bystanders cheered while her attackers grabbed her hair and spat on her. What should have been cause for worldwide outrage went largely ignored, but not completely unnoticed. See, Ali Mahmud - who photographed Shani in her most degrading moments - won the prestigious “Picture of the Year” award presented by the Missouri School of Journalism.

Rather than condemning Hamas’ unparalleled sadistic cruelty, many glorified the perpetrators and discredited the victims. From New York to Sydney, the sentiment was the same: October 7 was a victorious day of “resistance.” The freedom to abduct, slaughter, and rape Jews was colloquially dubbed “the day Gaza broke out of prison.” Over the next few days, Jewish communities worldwide circulated posters of abducted Israelis in hopes that raising awareness would help others call on Hamas to release the hostages. Within minutes, people began tearing the flyers down, claiming that raising awareness of kidnapped children is nothing more than war propaganda or an attempt to obtain “manufactured consent for genocide.” Alas, we are Jews, so everything we do is part of a pernicious and calculated plan to cheat the Gentiles and bring a new world order. 

Seeing crumpled-up hostage posters in the trash was nothing short of heartbreaking, but it is generally understood that kidnapping is wrong. Not many people spend their lives clarifying that abducting children is bad and denouncing people who abduct children. Feminists, on the other hand, outwardly announce their opposition to patriarchy, which still, to this day, treats women as second-class citizens. 

When footage of brutalized Israeli women circulated online, an Instagram account, ironically named ‘Feminist,’ published a statement referring to the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of over 1200 Israelis as “retaliation to Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.” Yes, you read that right. The very people who’d been screaming “believe all women” and ”me too” for the past five years had come to the conclusion that rape is okay sometimes. Speakup, a self-described “feminist initiative to support victims of violence,” accused the New York Times of “weaponizing sexual violence against women for occupation propaganda” after they published an article detailing Hamas’ sexual violence on October 7. The ability to disregard mountains of evidence is symptomatic of an intellectual epidemic plaguing the new left, where narratives have replaced truth and reality has become irrelevant. 

Soon, antizionists began to claim that accusing Hamas of rape was an act of Islamophobia and racism. A post shared by Wolpalestine chair, Nerdeen Kiswani, read “it is so insanely racist that a bunch of you are making up brown rapist hordes in your heads to delegitimize an actual revolution happening in front of your face.” A few weeks later, a popular Instagram account, Key48return, wrote that it is “Islamophobic and racist” to believe that Hamas committed sexual violence. 

Just as I felt like I was about to lose my mind, I came across a tweet so sociopathic that it sent me into an epiphany:

Amelia’s breakthrough was brought to you by New York Times Contributor Noah Kulwin.

A wave of clarity washed over me. In a full-circle moment, I was back in 2022, reliving the Colleyville hostage crisis, the last time progressives demanded that hostage-taking be viewed through the lens of intersectionality. When progressives realized that Akram was an Islamist, they lost all concern for the hostages and opted to address the hypothetical impending Islamophobia. Flash forward to 2023, and the same goes. Even in cases of mass murder, hostage-taking, and sexual violence, Islamists are not to be condemned or punished because…we wouldn’t want people to think we were racist, would we? And, of course, that’s more important than doing what’s right!

As this disturbing pattern continues, it becomes increasingly clear that selective outrage, whether over antisemitism or sexism, is more about self-righteousness than genuine concern. The blatant hypocrisy reveals that one’s commitment to social justice causes are often shallow and performative. The selective moralizing shows that what truly matters is the opportunity to virtue signal rather than address real suffering. In the end, selective empathy renders the oppressed completely unacknowledged and unsupported, exposing the emptiness behind the self-proclaimed advocacy.