This past May, I graduated from UCLA Law — not as your typical student, but as a father of four who proudly wore T-shirts with American and Israeli flags every day since October 7, 2023, to show my appreciation for America and my support of Zionism. After enduring firsthand antisemitism and religious discrimination, I sued. While sitting for the Bar this past July, I settled with UCLA for a permanent injunction and <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/ucla-settles-antisemitism-suit-with-6-13m-payout-as-feds-allege-discrimination/">$6.13 million</a> (In honor of the 613 commandments in the Torah). That same day, the Justice Department found UCLA in violation of <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-university-california-los-angeles-violation-federal-civil-rights">federal civil rights laws</a>. As Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noted, &#8220;UCLA failed to take timely and appropriate action in response to credible claims of harm and hostility on its campus.&#8221;
I’m grateful for the federal government’s swift investigation and actions, including freezing $584 million in grants and proposing a $1.2 billion fine, which have begun to hold UCLA accountable. This past week a federal judge&#8217;s preliminary injunction temporarily restored most of those NIH and NSF grants amid an ongoing lawsuit, this short-term reprieve doesn&#8217;t absolve the university&#8217;s civil rights violations or halt the push for lasting penalties.
Yet, lawsuits from UC unions and statements from California officials, alongside criticism from some Jewish groups calling these efforts ‘misguided and punitive,’ sow cynicism about the real threats Jewish students face. <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383774/trumps-ucla-funding-cut-hurts-science-and-fails-to-protect-jewish-students/">Article</a> after <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-08-19/ucla-1-billion-trump-antisemitism?fbclid=IwY2xjawMRwrBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETF4T1JsV25OTExCM1pDS3M3AR4Fi1kj0Y5eCUpmbtVOsPwqu8bOvRPbV7r57ot5HFAxVla808tPvx19vm-8UQ_aem_2VyFLfrWJ5zIpGSJ1dD6kQ">article</a> and <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/jewsforuc">statement</a> upon <a href="https://jpac-cal.org/2025/08/12/jpac-opposes-demand-of-a-1-billion-settlement-with-ucla/">statement</a> claim efforts to hold UCLA accountable have nefarious motivations and won&#8217;t protect Jewish students. The irony is that not holding UCLA accountable for persistent failure to address antisemitism is what truly endangers Jewish students. To those who stayed silent when Jews were excluded from campus areas and mobs called for &#8220;Intifada&#8221;: kindly sit this one out.
We can debate the details and methods for addressing UCLA&#8217;s abhorrent antisemitism, but one thing is clear: UCLA&#8217;s sidestepping shouldn&#8217;t fool anyone. They&#8217;re ignoring antisemitism, rather than confronting it head-on.
Even more troubling: Why are some Jewish organizations providing cover for UCLA? Ask <a href="https://crownheights.info/chabad-news/886911/poll-show-that-jewish-university-students-overwhelmingly-feel-chabad-on-campus-supports-them/">Jewish student leaders on campus</a>, and they&#8217;ll tell you only a handful of legacy groups have been helpful. It&#8217;s bad enough that some did nothing to empower students; now, they&#8217;re undermining our efforts.
<div id="attachment_982587" style="width: 825px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-982587" class="size-large wp-image-982587" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-815x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Yitzy Frankel" width="815" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-815x576.jpg 815w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-300x212.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-768x543.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-1536x1086.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/MixCollage-07-Oct-2025-04-24-PM-8454-2048x1448.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 815px) 100vw, 815px" />Credit: Yitzy Frankel</div>
From personal experience, I can spotlight one: the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC). My friend Shabbos Kestenbaum and I met with SWC leaders, including the CEO, but nothing came of it. Now, they&#8217;ve &#8220;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DNRZv--y-en/?img_index=1">proudly</a>&#8221; signed a letter just last month with the Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC) opposing the federal funding freeze and penalty, claiming it &#8220;does not make Jewish students safer&#8221; (Blind to the reality that perhaps it’s unchecked antisemitism that is making campus unsafe for Jewish students). When I contacted them about how their support spreads lies and misinformation — directly harming Jewish students and covering up antisemitism — I got no response. SWC&#8217;s credibility is now being <a href="https://www.jewishvoicesnj.org/articles/california-jewish-groups-say-trump-1b-demand-of-ucla-does-not-make-jewish-students-safer/">weaponized</a> to shield antisemites, offering silent consent to UCLA&#8217;s inaction instead of demanding real change.
The JPAC statement SWC endorses claims &#8220;meaningful progress is underway.&#8221; Here&#8217;s the reality:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Governor Newsom&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Golden-State-Plan-to-Counter-Antisemitism.pdf">Golden State Plan to Combat Antisemitism</a>&#8220;: This April 2024 pamphlet mentions &#8220;Islamophobia,&#8221; &#8220;Arab Americans,&#8221; &#8220;anti-Arab,&#8221; &#8220;anti-Muslim,&#8221; and &#8220;Muslim&#8221; a combined 24 times across 16 pages—undermining the supposed focus on antisemitism. It&#8217;s mostly fluff about councils making recommendations and commissions assessing data, and it&#8217;s proven ineffective at UCLA.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A <a href="https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/updates-uc-campus-climate-efforts">Letter</a> from the UC President: It supposedly bans encampments, masking to conceal identity, and blocking campus access, while enforcing time, place, and manner restrictions. But encampments were already illegal, students are never asked to unmask, and rules are openly flouted, with little to no real enforcement.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Praise for Chancellor Frenk: He &#8220;established a dedicated antisemitism initiative, suspended student groups fostering hostility toward Jews, and delivered forceful remarks.&#8221; In truth, Frenk offers empty words. His only action against SJP followed their protest at a Jewish regent&#8217;s <a href="https://dailybruin.com/2025/02/05/pro-palestine-protesters-demonstrate-outside-uc-regent-jay-sures-home">literal doorstep</a>, harassing him and his family. In June 2024, UCLA&#8217;s Administrative Vice Chancellor, Michael Beck, needed <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8Ed7ALOPSo/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">security guards</a> to fend off a masked mob — protection not extended to students.</li>
</ol>
That suspension? Meaningless. Less than two weeks later, SJP held another rally in the same spot as the encampment, complete with drums, megaphones, masks, and a poster glorifying Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. They marched through an academic building, pulled a fire alarm to evacuate classes, blocked streets, and assaulted people — including elbowing me and stealing my USA/Israel flag from a friend nearby — in front of UCLA security.
This was one of many violations, including a grotesque 2024 rally on the anniversary of October 7. After these rallies, their gear is wheeled to the <a href="https://x.com/camhigby/status/1923137670005297443">Muslim Student Association</a> as security turns a blind eye and chases off journalists like Cam Higby. UCLA&#8217;s &#8220;response&#8221;? Sending Student Affairs Monitors to gently &#8220;cajole&#8221; the mob into compliance.
I know UCLA&#8217;s apathy firsthand: UCLA refused to help press charges against encampment participants or discipline any students or faculty. As Andy Ngo <a href="https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1844150116518854735">reported</a>, a law student, Taylor &#8220;Sanyika&#8221; Maloney, remains an enrolled student despite assaulting pro-Israel protesters on camera — including harassing me. She celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, openly supported Hamas, and advocated for killing cops. Because UCLA stonewalled law enforcement, the LA City Attorney dropped charges against her and dozens more.
If UCLA truly cared, it would adopt <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d3ERibWx5D8pS1ky_a8yUX99osE_NqlI/view">recommendations</a> from the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG) as a baseline. Instead, this grassroots powerhouse, which has been at the forefront of fighting antisemitism at UCLA, has been ignored and retaliated against.
Donors to large Jewish organizations: Don&#8217;t ask them what they&#8217;re doing for students — ask students what they&#8217;ve done for us. Support groups that students and faculty vouch for.
UCLA&#8217;s environment silences pro-Israel voices. In May 2024, they blocked a pro-Israel speaker, as the Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ucla-blocked-pro-israel-event-conservative-student-group-says">reported</a>. The Daily Wire knows UCLA&#8217;s tactics: In 2017, they dropped an unconstitutional &#8220;<a href="https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-drops-unconstitutional-security-fee-demand-ben-shapiro-talk-legal-threat/">security fee</a>&#8221; for Ben Shapiro&#8217;s event. In 2024, I had the honor of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9OY9krfwX0">introducing Ben Shapiro</a> to a packed crowd (with hundreds outside), despite UCLA&#8217;s obstacles.
As a father of four children under eight — equal parts adorable and mischievous — I know misbehavior doesn&#8217;t change without consequences. Federal cuts and penalties are forcing change; they must continue despite lawsuits and smears. Research grants matter, but they should go to institutions that uphold civil rights, not violate them. Other universities, take note: Defy accountability, and pay the price.
* * *
Yitzy Frankel graduated from UCLA Law in May 2025 and now works in criminal defense litigation with renowned trial attorney Michael D. Schwartz. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Esther, and four young children. You can follow him on X <a href="https://x.com/YitZionist">@YitZionist.</a>
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
<a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=fall40&amp;utm_content=fallsale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial">Get 40% off new DailyWire+ annual memberships with code FALL40 at checkout!</a>

US-POLITICS-HEALTH-SCIENCE-TRUMP-PROTEST

No One Should Help UCLA Dodge Consequences. Especially Not Jewish Organizations.

American Universities

Anti-Semitism

Gaza

Intifada

Israel

Jewish

Pro-Palestinian

Protests

UCLA

In yet another disturbing episode of radicalized anti-government extremism, a 22-year-old New Hampshire man was arrested after allegedly <a href="https://patch.com/new-hampshire/concord-nh/nh-man-accused-threatening-governor-weapon-mass-destruction-making">threatening to assassinate</a> Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte using a “weapon of mass destruction” — while spewing grotesquely antisemitic rhetoric involving “Jew feds” and the “Israel Deep State.”
Tristan Alexander Anderson, of Merrimack County, was taken into custody on August 28 after police were tipped off about a series of violent threats he made via Snapchat. In one message, Anderson wrote chillingly, “I’m going to target the NH Mayor Kelly Ayott (sic) with my weapon of mass destruction.” He then launched into a deranged antisemitic rant, declaring, “These Jew feds need to f***ing die” and also writing, “Same with polygamy, WHICH WAS CREATED BY THE F***ING JEWS AND ISRAEL DEEP STATE.”
Despite his inability to correctly name the governor — or differentiate between a mayor and the state’s highest executive — Anderson appeared deadly serious. Authorities revealed he had access to firearms, metal pipes, fireworks, nuts, and bolts — all potential bomb-making materials. His roommate told police that Anderson not only discussed building pipe bombs, but also showed her the components and claimed to be actively working on them.
Anderson was a full-blown red-flag threat. Anderson expressed intent, named his target, referenced a weapon of mass destruction, and was stockpiling materials consistent with a bomb plot. “From the probable cause statement, it sounds like Tristan Anderson was actively trying to realize and bring about the threats that he was making about Governor Ayotte,” former criminal prosecutor Jesse O&#8217;Neill <a href="https://www.wmur.com/article/arrest-alleged-threat-nh-governor-ayotte-09172025/66940374">stated</a>. “Depending on how (it) develops, (prosecutors) could very well bring additional charges as this case moves into the indictment phase.”
Court documents show the man was not unknown to law enforcement. Anderson has prior charges stemming from a March 2024 incident and another in <a href="https://patch.com/new-hampshire/concord-nh/missing-bike-concord-church-service-leads-felony-charge-cop-log">December 2023</a>. He now faces felony charges of threatening a government official, with more possible as the investigation progresses.
Governor Ayotte, who took office amid <a href="https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2025/01/09/in-inaugural-address-ayotte-warns-of-budget-cuts-talks-up-efas-sanctuary-city-ban/">promises of law and order</a>, has reportedly been in discussions with state lawmakers and security officials to reevaluate protective measures for elected officials.
Anderson apparently embraced conspiracy theories that echo modern antisemitic talking points about Israel, government control, and Jewish influence.
Anderson is being held without bail and is scheduled for a dispositional hearing in November.

GOP New Hampshire Senate Candidate Kelly Ayotte Holds Election Night Event

Leftist Extremist Threatens GOP Gov With ‘Weapon Of Mass Destruction,’ Goes On Antisemitic Tirade

assassination

Crime

Kelly Ayotte

New Hampshire

U.S.

The United Nations Human Rights Council this week released a report <a href="https://www.ungeneva.org/en/news-media/news/2025/09/110618/gaza-top-independent-rights-probe-alleges-israel-committed-genocide?utm_source=chatgpt.com">accusing</a> Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. But the report — like the group behind it — is dripping with anti-Israel bias.
Issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the report was authored by three of the UN’s most rabid anti-Israel ideologues. Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti all have long records of vilifying Israel, legitimizing Hamas talking points, and pushing the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS).
The report is the latest example of hypocrisy from the UNHRC, which has long been accused of coddling the world’s worst human rights abusers while obsessively targeting the only democracy in the Middle East.
Let’s break it down.
Navi Pillay, the chair of the commission, has accused Israel of “collective punishment” and “targeting children”— all while saying little or nothing of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields or the mass slaughter of Israeli innocents on October 7, 2023. She also supervised the virulently anti-Israel Goldstone Report, which was later rejected by its primary author, Justice Richard Goldstone, who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html">explained</a> in the Washington Post, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
In 2010, her office <a href="https://unwatch.org/letter-to-un-high-commissioner-of-human-rights-navi-pillay/">refused to remove</a> a monstrous antisemitic message on its website that falsely accused Israeli doctors of a racist conspiracy to steal Palestinian organs.
Miloon Kothari, condemned for his antisemitic remarks about “Jewish control” of social media — Pillay <a href="https://www.jns.org/un-investigator-blasted-for-saying-social-media-controlled-largely-by-jewish-lobby/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">claimed</a> his comments were “misquoted” — continues to peddle anti-Israel tropes with the full backing of the UN bureaucracy.
Chris Sidoti, a left-wing activist lawyer, serves on the advisory board of the Australian Centre for International Justice, which <a href="https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/anti-israel-bias-and-ngo-links-of-unhrcs-gaza-committee-of-inquiry-members/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">calls</a> Israel a “settler-colonial apartheid regime” and supports the BDS movement, which seeks to economically and politically isolate Israel from existence.
These are the “independent investigators” tasked with assessing Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
The report’s conclusion that Israel is committing genocide was based not on legal rigor, but on a one-sided narrative that erases context, whitewashes Hamas terrorism, and accuses Israel of everything from starvation to sexual violence, even alleging that Israel is trying to “prevent births” among Palestinians.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Danny Meron, flatly rejected the report as a “Hamas propaganda document,” saying it cherry-picked data to promote a false narrative designed to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state.
“The report falsely accuses Israel of genocidal intent, an allegation it cannot substantiate,” Meron said. “It serves Hamas and its backers.”
Notably, the commission makes only a passing reference to the October 7 massacre, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis in one of the most horrific attacks in modern Jewish history. Instead, it blames Israel for virtually every aspect of the conflict, even accusing it of violating Qatari sovereignty when striking Hamas leadership in Doha — as if Hamas officials deserve diplomatic immunity.
The timing of the report is no accident. All three commissioners — Pillay, Kothari, and Sidoti — resigned in July, with their departures taking effect in October 2025. The rush to publish this political hit job now, just weeks before they leave, is transparently an effort to dodge accountability as American sanctions loom.
Even under pressure, the UNHRC gave this commission an open-ended mandate — unique among all UN investigations — to focus only on Israel, not on Hamas atrocities or Palestinian terror networks. As Trump’s administration put it in 2018: “The UNHRC is a protective body for countries committing horrific human rights violations.”
China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Qatar all sit on the Council. But it’s Israel — the country rescuing hostages, warning civilians before strikes, and defending its citizens from terrorists — that gets called genocidal?
President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the UNHRC in 2018 — and again in 2025 — is looking more prescient by the day. In February, he slammed the UN’s human rights bodies as being “contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating antisemitism.”
He wasn’t wrong. As UNRWA employees were revealed to have aided Hamas in the October 7 attacks, and as hostages reported being held in UN facilities, the same UN was busy preparing to lecture Israel about morality.
This report is the latest proof that the UN’s moral compass is not just broken, but actively spinning toward terror-supporting regimes.

SWITZERLAND-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-UN-CONFLICT-RIGHTS-INVESTIGATION

UN Taps Three Rabid Israel-Haters To Push ‘Genocide’ Smear

Donald Trump

genocide

Global Politics

Lying

Politics

United Nations

United Nations Human Rights Council

Our nation just witnessed the tragic shooting of Charlie Kirk, who was not only a leading voice for conservatives but was a bold believer and passionate advocate for faith in Jesus Christ and a Christian worldview. It’s been barely two weeks since a mentally ill individual terrorized the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring 18 others.
Unfortunately, these two incidents are just the most recent examples of how religious persecution, once a threat continents away, has arrived on the doorstep of faithful Americans.
Over the past several years, religious persecution has risen sharply worldwide. Last year, <a href="https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/">380 million Christians</a> around the world faced “high levels” of persecution. According to <a href="https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/">Open Doors</a>, that number is up 15 million from the previous year. That is the highest number ever recorded. But Christians are not the only religious group facing a steep surge in hostilities. Jews around the world are experiencing a dramatic increase in victimization as well after Hamas’s grisly attack against Israel on October 7. <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/report/top-5-global-antisemitic-trends-october-7-one-year-impact-report">Antisemitic incidents skyrocketed</a> around the globe, particularly in Europe, where reports of antisemitism rose by <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/report/top-5-global-antisemitic-trends-october-7-one-year-impact-report">1,000% in some countries</a>. 
According to the <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/us-antisemitic-incidents-skyrocketed-360-aftermath-attack-israel-according">Anti-Defamation League</a>, antisemitism has jumped 361% in the United States. That trend began in 2013 but has dramatically increased in the months and years following the October 7 attack. Hostility has also surged against Christians and churches. A report published by the <a href="https://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF25H55.pdf">Family Research Council</a> found that incidents of violence against churches have gone up 740% since 2018.
The data alone shows a concerning rise in hostility against people of faith, but people of faith themselves are also feeling the effects. A recent American Jewish Committee <a href="https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2024/GeneralPublic">survey </a>of American Jews revealed that more Jews in America feel the threat. In the survey, 92% of the participants expressed that antisemitism had increased over the past five years. Among the general public, the survey found that 71% of the participants believe that antisemitism is a growing problem.
Christians are feeling the pressure, too. Over the past 16 years, the Survey Center on American Life has tracked Christians’ feelings of discrimination. In <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-most-evangelicals-say-they-face-a-lot-of-discrimination/#:~:text=Daniel%20A.,less%20than%20they%20used%20to.">2009</a>, the survey found that most evangelical Christians rejected the notion that they were experiencing discrimination, with only about four in ten (42%) saying Christians faced “a lot of discrimination.”
Over the next decade, that number had rapidly shifted. By <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-most-evangelicals-say-they-face-a-lot-of-discrimination/#:~:text=Daniel%20A.,less%20than%20they%20used%20to.">2023</a>, most Christians said they were experiencing discrimination. The number jumped to 60% when asked if they had experienced “a lot of discrimination.”
I’ve spent years working and ministering in the most dangerous places in the world for Christians to live. I am acutely aware of what religious persecution looks like and what it is like to live under religious oppression. In Northern Nigeria, a place where more Christians are killed for their faith than anywhere else in the world, I see the impact of persecution every day.
Persecution doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a slow, gradual process that takes time. It begins by marginalizing people of faith, rendering them lower-class citizens. We saw this in Nazi Germany when the propaganda against Jews portrayed them as less than human. We can see it today in how people of faith are portrayed in modern mainstream media. Christians and Jews are often portrayed in a negative light and are labeled as traditional oppressors who want to stunt culture’s inevitable evolution. 
These sentiments, in turn, create general hostilities toward people of faith. And when hostilities happen (like the recent Annunciation Catholic School shooting or the Covenant School shooting in 2023), the mainstream media largely ignores them or misrepresents the motives behind the attacks. As hostilities grow and aggressors feel they can get away with acts of discrimination and violence, the cycle continues to spiral to a fever pitch.
I’ve seen this cycle play out time and again in Northern Nigeria. In just 10 short years, Nigeria has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian.
What is often not accounted for, however, is the positive effect that persecution can have on the faith community.
Persecution often produces an indelible resolve among people of faith. When experiencing persecution, people of faith can become more resilient and deepen their faith. Tertullian said it this way, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
Throughout history, this phenomenon has been observed in both Christian and Jewish cultures. The more they are persecuted, the more resolute they become, growing not only in faith but in numbers as well. The key for people of faith to endure the persecution of our day is to use the hostilities, discrimination, and violence as a motivation to stand firm in their beliefs.
All of us in the faith community should realize that acts of hostility only validate the legitimacy of our Judeo-Christian values and the spiritual battle we are in. Scripture teaches us that true believers will suffer persecution (2 Timothy 3:12, Matthew 5:10). It also encourages us to stand up in those times and resolve never to back down, no matter the cost (Ephesians 6:12).
* * *
<a href="https://www.acrossnigeria.org/ourfounder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brad Brandon</a> is the founder and CEO of <a href="https://www.acrossnigeria.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Across Nigeria</a>. Since 2018, he has been actively serving in predominantly high-risk, highly persecuted areas like Northern Nigeria and other parts of West Africa.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Church memorial for the mass shooting victims that killed two children and injured 21 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Why Christians And Jews Are Facing A New Wave Of Hostility

Annunciation Catholic School

Charlie Kirk

Christians

Church

Jews

Nigeria

Religion

When people say “political violence is wrong,” does that change the underlying substructure of thought that leads to a massive elevation in violence in the country of the political variety?
I don&#8217;t think it means anything to just say that political violence is wrong, because there are actual substrates of thought that lead to the elevation of the violence that compel fringe actors to go out and do things like murder Charlie Kirk.
Thus, having our politicians simply go out there and say, “We&#8217;ve got to take down the temperature; we all have to use better language,” is absolutely true, but it isn&#8217;t specific enough.
Chuck Schumer said, “The bottom line is this is a time that all Americans should come together and feel and mourn what happened. Violence, which affects so many different people of so many different political persuasions, is an affliction of America, and coming together is what we ought to be doing, not pointing fingers of blame.”
Hakeem Jeffries said, “This moment requires leadership that brings the American people together, as opposed to trying to further divide us. Political violence in any form against any American is unacceptable, and should be denounced by everyone. And moving forward, we have to figure out a better way to come together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.”
All of this is correct.
But all of this is incredibly vague.
I want to talk about something that we all know is true, but nobody seems to want to say: Not all ideologies are equally prone to violence.
When there is a shooting, a mass shooting at a synagogue, a mass shooting at a church, when Charlie Kirk is shot, everybody&#8217;s mind immediately goes to this: What are the likeliest probabilities in terms of who did the shooting? 
Everyone does this. We cannot pretend that we are blind to the realities of the world. When there is a shooting at a synagogue, I can tell you my mind goes to two places: radical Muslim or white supremacist. Those are usually the options. If there&#8217;s a shooting at a church, your mind might go to a trans radical or a radical Muslim. 
That&#8217;s where your mind is going to go. And this is leaving aside people who are generally mentally ill or where there&#8217;s no political ideology involved. If there is a political ideology involved, your mind immediately goes to the movements that are likely to drive people toward murder.
Not every ideology is prone to this. No one thought that when Charlie Kirk was shot, it was because of his stance on low taxes. No one thought that. We differ on all sorts of politics in this country. Nobody thought that a debate about marginal tax rates was why Charlie was shot. Nobody believes Charlie Kirk was murdered because of his stance on energy policy. 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2279-breaking-charlie-kirk-assassin-in-custody?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
In order for an ideology, for a movement to coalesce in such a way that it allows for violence — the sort of bubbling of violence that lies at the outskirts of a movement — there have to be some preconditions.
I&#8217;ve been talking a lot about lions and scavengers. What we are seeing here is the scavengers at work. 
The basic philosophy of the scavenger is very simple: All models and civilizations are merely guises for power. My failure is a result of one of those corrupt power systems. There&#8217;s a great conspiracy out there. I am the victim. I&#8217;m being targeted. I am the actual victim. 
And thus, if there is a great conspiracy that is targeting me for destruction, I must respond in kind with violence.
This is how you get to the idiotic notion that speech is violence. 
Those are the three elements: “Morals and civilizations that I don&#8217;t like are simply guises for power,” “My failure within that system is a result of that great conspiracy and I am the victim,” and “It is an existential threat to me and therefore I must act out with violence and harm somebody.”
Let me give you three examples, and I&#8217;m going to take them from the top death threats I received. 
I receive an enormous number of death threats. I have 24/7 security on me, on my family. I literally go nowhere without an entire team of security at this point in my life. And that is because of things like what happened to Charlie.
There are three main wings that I get these threats from: Trans ideology/Marxist ideology, white supremacists, and radical Muslims. 
I want to go through each one of those and explain why these particular ideologies, why these particular movements are likely to generate violence. 
A trans ideology says that your argument about biology, that there is simply male and female, is, in fact, a guise for power. You&#8217;re doing it because you hate me; you wish to erase me. I am a victim of your failure to accept my identity, such that you&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re engaging in a “trans genocide,” and therefore, you are threatening me. Your speech is a form of violence. It is wiping away my identity. 
And therefore violence ought to be met with violence.
Marxist ideology, which is derived from the same general area, is the idea that the governmental system, the free market system, is an imposition on me. It is a conspiracy from above to harm me, to destroy me. My failures inside the market are actually not my own. They&#8217;re the fault of the system. And you, as an advocate for the system, are victimizing me. You&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re destroying me. And I must act with violence. There&#8217;s a reason why Marxist movements are so violent. They say that speech, advocacy for the free market, is, in fact, a system of power. It is to be met with violence. 
White supremacy: I know that there&#8217;s an attempt to pretend that this doesn&#8217;t exist, but it absolutely exists in online spaces. Pretending it doesn&#8217;t is bulls*** and everyone knows it. I know it because I&#8217;ve had to have the FBI arrest somebody who was doing this while threatening not just me, by the way, but Donald Trump Jr. 
That ideology says that white people are being put upon in the United States by an entire system. And if you&#8217;re an advocate for that system, you are threatening me with destruction, with erasure, with white genocide, and thus you must be killed. Violence is a proper response to an attempted genocide. That is the argument that is made, at root, by many white supremacists. 
I&#8217;m not talking about what the Left calls white supremacy, which is anything to the right of Hillary Clinton. I&#8217;m talking about actual, honest-to-God white supremacists. I get an awful lot of death threats from them.
Group number three, radical Muslims, who believe that the failures of the Palestinians, for example, are the result of evil Western systems. And thus, if you are an advocate for those systems, it&#8217;s because you want to erase the radical Muslims and you want to kill people and you want to commit genocide, and therefore it is fine to shoot two Israeli embassy staffers dead in Washington, D.C. That is why it is fine to throw a Molotov cocktail at an 80-year-old woman in Colorado who was protesting Israeli hostages being held. 
We all know this is true. Pretending it isn&#8217;t true doesn&#8217;t make it go away. Not all movements are equally likely to bubble up with violence.
And so when we have politicians saying political violence is bad, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that use this logic, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that say that speech is in fact a form of violence, that systems are in fact a form of violence, and that violence is the proper response to that, then you are contributing to the environment in which this kind of stuff happens. 
It is not that there are many radical Muslims in the United States, by the numbers, thank God.
It’s not that there are many white supremacists in the United States.
But by the numbers, the increasing radicalism of the Left in the United States is, in fact, a massive issue. 
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently did rankings of campus free speech. And what they found is that college campuses are replete with the failure to speak your mind. 
Why? Because people are afraid of violence.
It goes all the way back to when I was in college. There&#8217;s nothing new here. I wrote my very first book, “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth,” in 2004 about the kind of discrimination conservatives faced on campus. And yes, there was the possibility of violence, even in 2004, not being shot, but the possibility of being physically assaulted, which is something that came close to happening to me multiple times, even when I was an undergrad. 
That&#8217;s going back 20 years, when I was warning that this was going to metastasize and take over huge swaths of the political Left. People ignored it at the time. But it was true.
I spoke in 2015 at the University of Missouri during the Black Lives Matter upsurge, after Ferguson. And I remember people asking about safety. I said, “I&#8217;m not worried about safety. There are some police there; I&#8217;ve got a security team now. No one’s going to take a shot at me. This is America. You don&#8217;t get shot in America for saying things on a college campus. This is America. I grew up in this country. This is my country. This is a country I love. This is where our fundamental value is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. No one&#8217;s going to do this kind of stuff. No one.” 
But it&#8217;s becoming more and more common. According to FIRE, a record 1-in-3 students now hold some level of acceptance, even if only rarely, for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. 
Now, I&#8217;m sure not everybody who believes they&#8217;re using violence thinks in terms of shooting someone to death. But when you are drawing from a pool at this point of legitimately tens of millions of young Americans, who are atomistic and isolated and don&#8217;t touch grass, it is not going to be hard to find some unhinged people who decide to take that to its logical conclusion and fire a bullet through the throat of a man who is simply attempting to speak truth to people in the friendliest possible fashion. 
I don&#8217;t like when people say “They shot Charlie,” because “they” isn&#8217;t a person. A person shot Charlie Kirk, and he shot Charlie Kirk for a deranged reason.
With that said, there are movements in which the substrate of their political thinking leads to an elevation in violence. Period. End of story. That is a reality.
And it is not enough to just say “political violence is bad” if you are not calling out the movements themselves.

TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-HOMICIDE-MASS-MEDIA-CRIME

Saying ‘Political Violence Is Wrong’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Ben Shapiro

Leftists

Marxism

Opinion

Radical Islam

Shooting

Transgender

White Supremacists

There are various types of what I call “scavengers.”
There are “leeches,” people who seek to tear down the institutions of free markets because they believe that they are entitled to the gains of others.
There are the “lechers,” people who believe that the traditional family, the church, have to be torn asunder because those things are an imposition from the outside.
And then there are the “barbarians.”
The barbarians are people who emanate from places outside the United States, outside the West. And they see themselves as representatives of civilizations that have been laid low by the West. They believe that all of their failures are the fault of Western civilizations.
As I write in my new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers</a>”:
<blockquote>The barbarian is an outsider to Western civilization who believes that all of his own maladies and ills can be laid at the feet of the colonizers of the West. In fact, the barbarian argues, only violence against his purported victimizers can free him of the servile mentality that these very colonizers have instilled in him. The barbarian speaks in the language of mass-murdering communist monster Che Guevara —whose visage still graces the T-shirts of thousands of misbegotten American college students — championing the power of hatred: “Hatred is an element of struggle, unbending hatred for the enemy which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.</blockquote>
The barbarians never posit a moral justification for how the destruction of the Western order ought to operate at their hands. They never explain just how, for example, a Palestinian state is somehow a burgeoning wellspring of human rights, or how an America without American values would make the world a better place. The only thing that matters is the destruction of the West, for in that destruction lies the supposed reclamation of the barbarian identity.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2271-the-ben-shapiro-show?elementPosition=3&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Last Friday, there was a big gathering of barbarians over in Detroit, Michigan, called the People&#8217;s Conference for Palestine. It was attended by a sitting member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib along with a wide variety of people who talked about the evils of America. They talked about how the country they were sitting in, this place that has given them prosperity, that has given them freedom, was an awful place. All of its core values are evil and terrible and need to be destroyed because America is a bad place, and Western civilization is responsible for all the ills of the rest of the world.
If you&#8217;re wondering why there are so many people in the West right are now moving toward right-wing parties, it is because those right-wing parties are saying, “We don&#8217;t need more of these people in our civilization.”
We don&#8217;t.
One speaker quoted someone saying that “the average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person, because the State of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States, and therefore the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in American&#8217;s heads so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside of the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things. We have to dismantle this idea of American exceptionalism, of supremacy, of being beyond reproach.”
He continued, “We live in an evil country.”
So get out. You can leave any time now.
Remember, the people who are being defended here by this person are the terrorist group Hamas.
There was not a single speaker at this event who said that Hamas should surrender, go into exile, and disarm, thus ending the war in Gaza and simultaneously ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
That was never mentioned by any of these people, because, of course, the fault always lies with America. It lies with the West. It lies with Israel. Anyone successful in the world is supposed to be a repository of exploitation.
Another speaker intoned, “We wanted to globalize the intifada, to expose to the world that Israel&#8217;s policies have nothing to do with security, that Israel tries to tell the world, and that our governments also regurgitate gaslighting us. We thought that if we could get this message out, the world would wake up and not allow Israel to do this, to do what it&#8217;s doing. And I must admit, that was a bit of naiveté on our part. But we have and we will continue to globalize the intifada, and we will force our government to listen to us, because they want us to accept a world that is inacceptable.”
“Inacceptable?” You mean unacceptable.
In any case, putting aside the grammar, the bigger problem here is the fact that “globalize the intifada” is a phrase that calls for widespread violence. That is what an intifada is, a violent uprising. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you.
<div id="attachment_967927" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-967927" class="wp-image-967927 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1024x576.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/MixCollage-02-Sep-2025-03-58-PM-6584-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>DailyWire+</div>
This is happening on the soil of America, as I write about in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tHy4SBp_hHF-vHhtJtJe1QIrxRz7s0Aj13eFEmYaXMkg9SrRHykHV_NHWW6XhQWoxW_rAOTa8CabDdBGhR-hiGxPlwULwtB0j0lCq6HTT435WCOIrExCNI18TVrbTwSf7166CTZarphzcNjpZCtlTA.3BzLBNx3TKfvkr_UgYlzL5F_NdZR1DsGAEXY3t63SrE&amp;qid=1756846409&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers</a>.” It&#8217;s not just that barbarians come from abroad and they enter our gates because we are soft-headed and soft-hearted. It&#8217;s also the enormous number of Americans who then side with the barbarians, because they don&#8217;t have confidence in their own civilization. They don&#8217;t have the belief in their own ideas to actually stand up to this garbage.
Lions are reflexively self-critical. What I mean by that is that in the West, there is actual moral merit to admitting your mistakes, to exposing yourself to the shame and ridicule of acknowledging guilt. That is something that good people tend to do.
Lions tend to do that because, after all, we live in a civilization, a Judeo-Christian biblically-based civilization, in which repentance is part of life. You&#8217;re supposed to acknowledge your sins so you can get stronger and get better.
The problem is that the barbarians and their allies are not interested in your proclamations of guilt. They&#8217;re not interested except to use it as a way to destroy you. They are interested in you shaming yourself. They want you to shame yourself and kneel before them so they can claim dominance. That&#8217;s the entire goal.
The co-founder of Doctors Against Genocide, last seen being ushered out of Congress after yelling at Marco Rubio during his confirmation hearings, called for the “taking out” of anyone who opposes his pro-terrorism agenda, saying they “need to be neutralized.”
This was in Detroit. Not in Qatar, or Iran.
This culminated with Rashida Tlaib, a sitting congresswoman from Michigan, ripping America and saying, “We are in your Congress.”
We know. We understand that the barbarian mentality is quite prevalent in our Congress.
“They thought they could kill us, rape us, and imprison us, violently, uproot us from our olive tree farms, starve our children to death, and we would disappear. Well, guess what? Now we&#8217;re in Congress and we&#8217;re in every corner of the United States,” she threatened. “We are just getting started.”
Yes, we understand that you have infiltrated Congress. We understand that. We understand there is a wide variety of people who have decided to stand in solidarity with all of this.
What is going to tear down the West is not just a West not confronted by the scavengers, but a West that allows the scavengers in; that somehow believes it is an aspect of its own greatness to allow the supremacy of people who wish to destroy its civilization.
That is the danger that lies within.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib Speaks To Press On Gaza Food Shortages

The Hate-America Barbarians Inside The Gates

Books

Congress

Detroit

Palestinians

Pro-Hamas

Western Civilization

While the vast majority of Americans who dwell outside the ivory tower may roll their eyes at the crazed, fanatical politics that have festered at many college campuses across the country, this extremism hits much closer to home for level-headed college students and faculty. Recently, the Trump Administration has been using its control over federal education grants to push back against campus radicalism at some of America’s most elite universities.
Yet still untouched is the massive power that the Obama and Biden Administrations granted to campus union bosses who are frequently at the center of the most extreme and sometimes even violent so-called “activism” taking place at universities. It is time that Trump appointees go to work to fix it.
You see, currently, union bosses on dozens of campuses across the country are exercising government-granted powers that require unwilling graduate students to associate with (and often subsidize) campus unions. College administrators are also forced to “negotiate” with these union officials over campus policies, including discipline for violent campus agitators.
Those unfamiliar with labor law might wonder how union officials obtained such clout on college campuses in the first place – aren’t graduate students students, and not workers on a production line?
It all traces back to controversial rulings by the Obama and Biden National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which handed union bosses the power to obtain monopoly “representation” power over graduate and doctoral students. In states that lack Right to Work protections, that power includes forcing students to pay union dues.
This means union bosses can upend graduate students’ academic careers if they refuse to fund a group whose ideology they find abhorrent, which threatens both academic freedom and religious freedom on campus.
<div id="attachment_967075" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-967075" class="size-large wp-image-967075" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-864x576.jpg" alt="ITHACA, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 3: People walk through the Cornell University campus on November 3, 2023 in Ithaca, New York. The university canceled classes after one of its students is accused of making violent antisemitic threats. (Photo by Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-1762566453.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images</div>
Take the case of David Rubinstein, a Ph.D. student in history at Cornell University whose research concerns the postwar Jewish diaspora in Europe. David, who is Jewish, wants as little as possible to do with the Cornell Graduate Student Union (CGSU-UE, an affiliate of the United Electrical union), knowing union officials’ virulent opposition to Israel and affinity for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
But when David exercised his right under federal law and demanded an accommodation to union dues payment based on his religious beliefs, union officials refused. They harassed Rubinstein and other religious objectors with unnecessary and illegal “questionnaires” that demanded they divulge particulars about their religious practice, their faith organizations, and faith leaders. As a result, with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, David is pursuing a federal civil rights case challenging CGSU-UE’s illegal tactics.
Numerous graduate students at other campuses have similarly needed to take legal action just to get campus union bosses to respect their legal rights. Yet graduate students shouldn’t need to jump through union-created hoops and tangle with union lawyers just to pursue a graduate degree in the first place.
<a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial">End of Summer Sale &#8211; Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a>
Fortunately, a more comprehensive solution is on the horizon. Russell Burgett, another Ph.D. student from Cornell, recently launched a groundbreaking NLRB case to strike at the heart of union bosses’ monopoly bargaining powers on campuses. A victory for him would free any dissenting graduate student – whether their opposition is political, religious, financial, or otherwise – from having their academic fates dictated by union apparatchiks.
His Foundation-backed case argues that Obama and Biden NLRB appointees were wrong to “reinterpret” federal law to allow union officials to collectivize graduate students. Nothing in the statute’s plain text suggests that students, whose primary reason for being on campus is to pursue a degree, should be included in the National Labor Relations Act’s definition of “employees.”
If he wins, militant campus union bosses would be stripped of their government-granted powers that let them dragoon unwilling students into their ranks, while also freeing administrators of their current obligation to “negotiate” with union boss radicals over the conditions of all graduate students.
President Trump is currently staffing up his NLRB. He should ensure his appointees get to work quickly on ending the monopoly “representation” and forced-dues powers that previous administrations improperly handed to campus extremists.
* * *
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Cornell University, College Town, Ithaca, NY, stone entrance sign with red Geraniums

For Grad Students, Labor Day Needs To Be Liberation Day From Radical Campus Union Bosses

Boycott Divest Sanction

Labor Unions

Obama Administration

President Trump

Unions

On Tuesday, Australia announced it would expel Iran’s ambassador and suspend operations at Australia’s embassy in Tehran, accusing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of directing two antisemitic attacks, including the firebombing of a synagogue.
“Enough credible intelligence has now been gathered to reach the deeply disturbing conclusion that the Iranian Government has directed at least two of these attacks,” the Australian Foreign Minister’s Office <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/media-release/response-iranian-attacks">stated</a>. “Iran has sought to disguise its involvement but ASIO assesses it was behind the attacks on: Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney on October 20 last year; and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 6 last year.”
“We have informed the Iranian ambassador to Australia he and three additional Iranian diplomats will be expelled,” the statement continued. “We have suspended operations at our embassy in Tehran and all our diplomats are now safe in a third country. The Government will legislate so we can list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the IRGC &#8211; as a terrorist organisation.”
“Western security officials have said Tehran is increasingly turning to criminal networks in the West to target dissidents, critics and Jews. In another recent episode about two months ago, an alleged spy was arrested in Europe and German authorities said that Iran was suspected of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/iran-suspected-of-scouting-jewish-targets-in-europe-c92367c4?mod=article_inline">collecting information on Jewish targets</a> in Berlin to prepare for possible attacks,” The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/australia-blames-iran-for-antisemitic-attacks-expels-ambassador-bd63cfe6?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAgVTHU-bqkEarVLh3rjMjgp_QGnZrWNhB3D6pX8WHh89JAFMQ6sGxzikxFiEYg%3D&amp;gaa_ts=68ae2537&amp;gaa_sig=JHopOhKaIQX0YV1PohFfgPwH0WR76TCHcZBZ4IoxWtt5LlS7c-4KgSs56yO-5lL9i2dJP6vEhlAVNfNbm8JO8g%3D%3D">reported</a>.
<a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial" target="_blank" rel="noopener">End of Summer Sale – Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a>
“For decades, the Iranian regime has posed a threat to Israelis and Jewish communities around the world,” the Israeli embassy in Australia wrote on X. “Today, it became clear that this threat has reached Australian soil.  The international community can no longer be complacent. Australia has taken a principled stand, others should consider following suit.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
For decades, the Iranian regime has posed a threat to Israelis and Jewish communities around the world.
Today, it became clear that this threat has reached Australian soil.
The international community can no longer be complacent. Australia has taken a principled stand, others… <a href="https://t.co/WOBBF2p5u5">https://t.co/WOBBF2p5u5</a>
— Israel in Australia (@IsraelinOZ) <a href="https://twitter.com/IsraelinOZ/status/1960206082456047974?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 26, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Although the current Australian government seems to be intent on protecting local Jews, it is far less interested in protecting Jews in the state of Israel. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has presided over an era in which antisemitism has become pronounced in his country and anti-Israel actions have grown ever more public, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/australia-palestinian-state-albanese-3d32a2d823a430cb85d3f6a83158dd90">said</a> in early August that his country would recognize a Palestinian state.
Australian television presenter Erin Molan, a staunch defender of the West and Israel, denounced the Australian government for asserting they would recognize a Palestinian state in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of over 1,200 Israelis, bitterly offering congratulations to Hamas and other terrorist groups.
“A big congratulations to Hamas off the news out of Australia that our government, our Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister will be recognizing a Palestinian state,” Molan said acidly. “They are, of course, in control of Gaza. They are terrorists and they carried out October 7. So a big congratulations to them for this wonderful shot in the arm.”
“I’d like to pass on my condolences to the hostages, around 50, who are still trapped in tunnels, are desperate, dying, suffering immensely; to every child in Gaza, my condolences to you as well because this will only prolong your pain because our government has just given a massive big hurrah to the people responsible for your pain: Hamas, the terrorists,” she declared.
“And also a big shout-out to every other heinous, murderous terrorist group in the world who was looking for a kind of way to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Western world,” she said. “Who now know all they have to do is break into another country, slaughter, rape, chop off heads, hack them off on camera, burn children alive, and take hostages, including babies, then kill them, and ‘Bob’s your uncle’: there you go: statehood.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
A huge congratulations not JUST to H*mas… but to terrorists everywhere 💪 What a win… 🥳
Ohhhh and condolences to the hostages, kids in Gaza and innocents everywhere who will suffer even more so as a result 🙏
Australia has just announced it will recognise a Palestinian… <a href="https://t.co/MF7OF2eAfQ">pic.twitter.com/MF7OF2eAfQ</a>
— Erin Molan (@Erin_Molan) <a href="https://twitter.com/Erin_Molan/status/1954753839061746149?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 11, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

AUSTRALIA-RELIGION-POLITICS-FIRE-POLICE

Australia Expels Iranian Ambassador, Accuses Regime Of Orchestrating Antisemitic Attacks

Australia

Iran

IRGC

terrorist

World

Antisemitism is nothing new. It is an ancient evil, spanning from Haman to Hitler, and now manifesting in Hamas and Hezbollah. This is not just political ideology or a disturbing cultural trend, antisemitism is the primary objective from Hell.
After the Holocaust, the world promised, “Never again.” Yet here we are. The October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, surge in antisemitic rhetoric, violence targeting Jews and supporters of Israel all reveal an alarming truth: today’s complacency is tomorrow’s captivity.
When antisemitism rises, it doesn&#8217;t stop with the Jewish people. Hatred comes first for the Jews, then for everyone else. In denying the image of God in the Jewish people, antisemitism assaults the Judeo-Chrstian values that undergird peace and prosperity everywhere. That’s why Christians must stand up — against antisemitism and with Israel — now. We need to build a firewall against antisemitism or today’s generation will continue to spiral into moral confusion and spiritual blindness. 
Antisemitism is not just about politics. It’s about truth and the foundation of human flourishing. From Genesis to Revelation, there is no ambiguity whatsoever that there is a Divine purpose for the Jewish people. God’s Covenant with the Jews has not been nullified. Even in the New Covenant through Christ, there is a plan for the Jewish people in Israel.
That’s why I push back against replacement theology, the lie that the Church has replaced Israel in God’s divine plan. The apostle Paul makes the truth clear in Romans: God’s promises to the Jewish people still stand. The Church ought to reject replacement theology and, instead, embrace its calling to bless and stand with Israel.
The tide of antisemitism rises with violence and spiritual crises in our communities. It is a diabolical — truly demonic — attempt to erase the image of God from the Jewish people, undermining morality and humanity everywhere. We must be spiritually vigilant. This means prayer, public engagement and prophetic activism.
Christians must raise their voices. Pray to God, but also call upon your pastors, church communities and elected officials. Call out cowardice disguised as political neutrality. Confront the lies propagated online. Of the 100,000 evangelical churches in America, how many pastors spoke up after October 7? How many feared losing followers or political favor? Silence in the face of evil is complicity, and I call on all Christians to rise up and stand in support of Israel.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) is one ministry leading the way. For years, the IFCJ has united Christians and Jews through shared values and compassion, providing aid for Holocaust survivors, helping persecuted Jews immigrate to Israel and strengthening the holy bonds among Christians and Jews.
After October 7, the IFCJ launched the Flags of Fellowship project. The unifying initiative raises Israeli flags alongside Christian banners in churches across America. The public declaration is simple and critical: we will not be silent and we will not stand idly by.
I’ve met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Arab Christians and both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Israel. The tiny Jewish state is home to the freest Arabs and Christians in the region. It is the only nation in the region where minority communities — Christians, Muslims, Druze and others — can participate fully in society and serve in the government. Israel is not the villain of the Middle East. The portrayal of Israel as an oppressor is not just wrong; it’s a calculated, diabolical lie. Don’t swallow the lie. Speak up for the truth.
<a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial">End of Summer Sale &#8211; Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a>
Every believer can take action. We must. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Speak truth when lies spread. Contact your representatives in Congress. Preach truth from the pulpit, post it on social media and proclaim it in your daily life.
As believers, we are engaged in spiritual warfare, but we have the truth and we must practice prayerful vigilance. Remember Romans 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation.” God calls us to thwart evil in all its forms, including that of antisemitism.
We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past and let evil persist. We need to engage in bearing witness, in reaching out to the Jewish community. We must not echo the complacency that destroyed Germany in the late 1930’s and led to the systematic murder of millions of people.
When hatred rises again — which it will — let us use our voices to conquer it. Silence is not an option. Silence is antithetical to the Christian faith. Locking arms with the Jewish people, let us stand together, defend truth and proclaim God’s love. For such a time as this, we are called to stand together and speak up.
* * *
Pastor Samuel Rodriguez is the lead pastor of New Season, one of America&#8217;s most influential megachurches, and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which represents millions of Christians worldwide. Rodriguez has advised three U.S. Presidents and is the first Latino to participate in multiple presidential inauguration ceremonies. He is also a best-selling author of 12 books and serves as producer of 7 faith-based films including &#8220;Breakthrough,&#8221; &#8220;Flamin&#8217; Hot,&#8221; and &#8220;Dream King.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Side by side spires with cross and star of david

Silence Is Not An Option: Why Christians Must Stand Against Antisemitism

Bible

How is it possible that Jews in New York could support a mayoral candidate that labels Israel genocidal and calls for the “intifada to be globalized?”
The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-jewish-voters-gaza.html">New York Times</a> would have us believe that there are many such Jews. I have trouble believing anything the NYT prints on this subject given the overwhelming evidence that they lie, distort and manipulate when it comes to Jews and Israel, as proven by their recent story about starving children in Gaza based on an altered photo, and their infamous lie about a bombed hospital in October 2023. So, it’s no surprise that in their Mamdani story, two of the five Jews interviewed work for the Mamdani campaign.
Even without such distortion, however, it is true that some Jews voted for Mamdani in the Democrat primary, and will vote for him again in the general election. 
I am an Orthodox Jewish film director, author and influencer, which is to say, a visible Jew both on the street and online. So, I’ve been getting asked, “What’s the story with your fellow Jews? How could they vote for a man who hates Israel and hates the Jews?”
To understand this, you first need to know something about Jews, namely, that we’re all different. We’ve been around for so long, and lived in so many countries, and fallen into so many different categories, that there is no such thing as a typical Jew.
Non-Jews, whether they love us or hate us, tend to lump us all together. They’re not entirely wrong because we’re not primarily a religion or a nationality – we’re a family. Now, every family contains different types of and categories of people, but the family remains distinct because relatives resemble each other physically, intellectually, temperamentally and spiritually.
Jews are not only a family, but we are also uniquely bound to God through the Torah and its system of commandments, as well as our shared destiny and connection to the Holy Land of Israel. The question is, why would a Jew who inherits our unbroken wisdom tradition stretching back 3,700 years turn his back on it?
Some chafe at the demands of the commandments. Others simply think they have a better idea, be it a credo they dreamed up or an “ism” to which they subscribed. And some turn their backs on our family to fit in at work, school, cocktail parties or online.
In seeking to curry favor with the Jew-hating mob, these Jews do enormous harm.
They often open their statements about Israel with, “As a Jew…” and then they parrot lies about Israel fabricated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, an entity created by Hamas to serve as the media arm of their terrorist organization. One glance at a fact-based website like StandWithUs.com, or even at a simple map of the region renders the bulk of these lies comically inept. After all, how can one Jewish state among 56 Muslim countries – most of which were not Muslim before the sword brought Islam to their lands – be labeled the “colonizer?”
<h3><a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial" target="_blank" rel="noopener">End of Summer Sale &#8211; Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a></h3>
Statistically, Jews are well-educated, high-achieving and score above average on IQ tests. Why then do some Jews fall for these obvious fabrications? One reason is that siding with Jew-haters against Israel makes them feel virtuous, and we must never underestimate the power of feeling virtuous. That feeling is so addictive that they indulge in it even at the cost of lives: when the As-a-Jews speak out against Israel and get quoted by the enemies of Israel, they strengthen the hearts of Hamas terrorists.
Senior Hamas official <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/08/03/palestinian-state-is-one-of-the-fruits-of-october-7-emboldened-hamas-credits-its-violence-for-gains-as-released-hostage-video-spurs-outcry/">Ghazi Hamad</a> said on Al Jazeera that the recent push by multiple nations to recognize Palestine as a state is the fruit of October 7. In other words, their plan is working. Why would any government reward a terrorist state for the murder and rape of Israeli civilians? Because Hamas claims, “Israel commits genocide, and even the Jews admit it.” And as long as that plan is working, Hamas will keep firing rockets from their children’s bedrooms so they can shriek with victim-glee when Israel inevitably counter strikes. This is how the Hamas death cult operates. This is the modern version of that ancient evil, child sacrifice.
And the murderous phase of the present cycle is lasting longer than it would otherwise because those As-a-Jews give cover to our enemies. Their virtue-signaling costs lives.
Now let us recall that despite our family resemblances, Jews are all different. Most Jews are not As-a-Jews.
In my <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/">Orthodox community</a>, Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, even when they disagree with its government, and we also oppose communism, socialism, and any &#8220;ism&#8221; that privileges people based on their genes rather than merit. In this time of elevated danger to the Jewish people, we’re also profoundly grateful to live in a country that rejects antisemitism like every other racism, and to have allies who can see through Hamas/Iran lies about Israel. Increasingly, we’re also exercising our Second Amendment right to bear arms – with care and training – to protect our families. God forbid the Jew haters who daily chant violence against us come to kill us, we will not be a soft target.
The percentage of Jews who subscribe to these societal views drops significantly when we look at Jews in non-Orthodox denominations, collectively known as liberal Judaism. This term should not be confused with liberal politics, because there are many religiously liberal Jews who are politically conservative. It’s true that religiously liberal Jews do tend to be politically liberal but even so, they are not Mamdani Jews. If they’re affiliated with a synagogue, they tend to support Israel and feel a visceral connection to the Jewish people.
Mamdani Jews are usually those who’ve untethered themselves from Torah entirely. Either they’ve never been exposed to Judaism, or they’re actively against it. They’ll give many reasons why, but their disconnection allows them to generate their own system of morality, and to fit in with the Jew-haters who lionize them. At least for a while. Historically, such Jews get attacked in the end just like the rest of their family.
The Jew-haters offer new and different reasons for their hatred in every generation: we’re too stand-offish or we’re too assimilated, we’re too rich or we’re too poor, we’re stateless or we have a Jewish state. Perhaps the simplest reason is that we’ve lived in exile for so long, that we’ve learned how to arrive on a new shore, identify what success looks like in that culture, and attain it in one generation, even while retaining our ancient traditions and transmitting them to our children. Invariably, we succeed by contributing to the nation that hosts us.
The Mamdani Jews go awry because they jettison the guard rails of Torah and tradition while retaining otherwise positive Jewish qualities like studiousness, generosity of heart, and sympathy for the underdog. Without the Torah’s holistic system for living, these lovely traits can cause an individual’s moral system to skid off the rails and cause great harm.
This process is summed up by an old adage: one who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. In this case, Mamdani Jews support the Hamas death cult because they’re moved by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-hamas-photo-propaganda-dupes-the-west-and-fuels-bds?author=Alyssa+Rosenheck&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=72&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=How+Hamas+Photo+Propaganda+Dupes+The+West+And+Fuels+BDS">pictures</a> of sickly children, and they shut their eyes to the evidence that the sickly child’s well-fed siblings have been cropped out by cynical terrorists and their willing accomplices in the media. The result is more innocent lives lost, not less.
We try desperately to open the eyes of our brethren to these facts, yet they remain clenched shut.
Perhaps they keep their eyes shut because if they were to absorb these facts, they would have to open their eyes to many more. They’d have to make an accounting of their choices in a life untethered from Torah and Jewish tradition – a fearless moral inventory – and such a process is not for the faint of heart.
I pray these Mamdani Jews will remember who they are, and the family they come from, before our enemies force them to remember with a globalized intifada. In the meantime, I hope the rest of the family will join our allies and vote against <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/zohran-mamdani-and-the-jews-14af43f4?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAiXzeTg6rT_DtLVtkWHw22Y7q0ybjI7ZcoEh0OYYjwlT5NyVSaIVojQJVPeQu0%3D&amp;gaa_ts=689cb022&amp;gaa_sig=lT5KNgm62Sfsp4Z8hzGOleVUIcosspzZlBFzbQN9sOr_1OBrZLQwnJiF8THoYFxy3dKjy7fyQE7t-62e3mVs5g%3D%3D">Mamdani</a> because he is an enemy of the Jews, meritocracy, Israel, and America.
* * *
Salvador Litvak is the director of &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnkqomKfd90">Guns &amp; Moses</a>,&#8221; coming back to theaters across America <a href="https://www.fathomentertainment.com/releases/guns-moses/">Sept. 7-11</a>, and the author of his bestselling book, &#8220;Let My People Laugh: Greatest Jewish Jokes of All Time!&#8221; Learn more at <a href="http://salvadorlitvak.com/">salvadorlitvak.com</a>
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Holds News Conference

Why Would A Jew Vote For Mamdani?

Mayor

New York City

Zohran Mamdani

Woke ideas, by definition, are fundamentally flawed. These include policies that can either be written off as unworkable — think high taxes, free health care, and open borders — or ridiculous impulses like gender confusion, environmental extremism, defunding the police, and critical race theory.
Over the past two years, the woke left has increasingly taken up a particularly alarming cause — antisemitism. Disturbingly, one of the most vocal proponents of this toxic ideology is perhaps the one best positioned to disseminate it where it does the most damage — in our children’s ears.
With astonishing regularity, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), finds itself embroiled in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAio3c5Mt0_L59ZPcvOPJickL051h1PbFLp_tScFw0mRoqrmcVgMIOsA6nnyibM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=688aa84c&amp;gaa_sig=LzMqnMYY5GorvJeQbZTzYtBBy9PjR6F0UEtTrKy5NvNssT-_RRcxOWjxtSm_an-HMy0mXn6s6GiAbh0Hv5M_hQ%3D%3D">controversy</a> around its attitude towards Jews and the conflict in Israel.
In late July, the leaders of the 3-million-member union were forced to walk back a <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/gaza-war-adl-teachers-union-nea-vote">decision</a> made earlier in the month when its 7,000-member Representative Assembly voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that has fought antisemitism and other forms of intolerance for over a century.
The body approved a measure stating that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.”
It reasoned: “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
The hypocrisy is palpable.
A week after its July 6th gathering in Portland, Oregon, members of the union’s Jewish Affairs Caucus penned a <a href="https://www.neajacaucus.org/post/letter-to-nea-leadership">letter</a> to NEA President Becky Pringle, noting that individual Jewish delegates to the event were “vocally mocked, harassed, and threatened in ways that dishonor our union.”
The letter continued, “Most unfortunate of all was how the NEA’s official statement framed the situation, as if U.S. classrooms were an extension of the battleground in Gaza … Presenting human dignity as a zero-sum game is perilous for all minorities. History teaches us that when one minority is deprived of its humanity without comment, others will be, too.”
“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” countered NEA delegate <a href="https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/07/educators-union-rejects-anti-defamation-league-cuts-ties">Stephen Siegel</a> from the assembly floor.
Publicly, Pringle acknowledged the Representative Assembly’s action went too far, <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-education/2025/07/21/nea-halts-bid-to-cut-ties-with-jewish-organization-00465130">stating</a>, “After consideration, it was determined that this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.”
Within days, however, the union’s true feelings came to light again when it announced plans to promote a version of Holocaust remembrance that does not even mention Jews, instead referencing, “…victims of the Holocaust from different faiths” and teaching that Israel was founded through “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.”
This wording comes directly from the priorities outlined in NEA’s <a href="https://www.nea.org/">2025 handbook</a>, which the union publishes each year as a guide on the group&#8217;s priorities and strategic goals for its national and state leaders, staff, and members. It includes the NEA&#8217;s bylaws and is updated with any new resolutions and policy positions the union has endorsed.
These aren’t isolated incidents. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAjStdmE5Sn12J-E4JPH8q2Os8fljrQpHJrtRWhjqSbFGcFj3jvZuqRKWEX9bFM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6890e11f&amp;gaa_sig=U7kbLb2MFLOViXFevR2KtAoLAxq3KPM9ZMb_XqIVIbO7hNpInieKcl1KH8QJS1WpqwlpKvfhq2REB_oFm2qzbQ%3D%3D">wrote</a> in the Wall Street Journal:
<blockquote>Local teachers’ unions in California have provided teachers with an anti-Israel script; in Minneapolis, they’ve labeled Israel as “apartheid.” In Chicago, the teachers’ union voted on anti-Israel resolutions and posted on social media that, “Zionists are not welcome.” In New York, the union representing City University of New York professors voted to divest from Israel. Others have gone so far as to prevent teachers from participating in mandatory antisemitism training. When the San Francisco Unified School District scheduled four such trainings for high school teachers, their union said they would support any educator who decided to skip the sessions.</blockquote>
Against this backdrop, Los Angeles District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, on July 21st, <a href="https://www.dailynews.com/2025/07/30/forced-representation-allows-haters-to-speak-on-behalf-of-their-victims/">dismissed a lawsuit</a> filed by seven Jewish teachers represented by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) — an affiliate of NEA — alleging the union had engaged in a pattern of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activity for years.
The Freedom Foundation, which is representing the teachers, plans to appeal Wilson’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sadly, it isn’t likely to be the last time the teachers&#8217; union’s politics of hatred are on display for a public that’s already had a bellyful of it.
* * *
Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

UTLA protest in Los Angeles, CA

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside The NEA’s Descent Into Antisemitism

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside NEA’s Antisemitism Problem

Education

National Education Association

Teachers Unions

Woke Culture

I still see his face every time I think of Washington Square Park: a stranger who was unapologetically pro-Hamas and made clear that he cheered the October 7 massacre in Israel.
As an Olympian on Israel’s bobsled team — a team with both Jewish and Arab athletes — I decided to engage with the public following the horrific events of October 7, 2023.
So, on October 15, 2023, I spent eight hours in a folding chair in New York City’s Washington Square Park. I placed a table in front of me with a sign that called Hamas a brutal terror organization and Israel a force for good. “Change my mind,&#8221; the sign read. Passersby questioned Israel’s right to defend itself, some even denied the brutality of Hamas. I spent the day dismantling every excuse for terror. I met them all with history, with personal testimonies, and with the same grit I bring to my Olympic training. Almost no one came by to actually defend Hamas, but most were almost exclusively anti-Israel.
<div id="attachment_958343" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958343" class="wp-image-958343 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-407x576.jpg" alt="Credit: AJ Edleman" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-29-PM-4687-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes=" (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" />Credit: AJ Edleman</div>
<div id="attachment_958345" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958345" class="wp-image-958345 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-384x576.jpg" alt="Credit: AJ Edleman" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-27-PM-7656-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes=" (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" />Credit: AJ Edleman</div>
But then, as the day was coming to a close, a man and his girlfriend approached the table. He was hot. Mad. Angry. He didn’t plead with a nuanced argument or context. He didn&#8217;t come to debate over Israel, he came to both defend Hamas and justify the attacks on October 7. It was deserved, you see. The natural reaction to Israel&#8217;s actions.
For over a decade, I have debated with all kinds of people on the topic of Israel. And there are some occasions when the feeling you are left with is far more powerful than the words the person used. I have hosted over a dozen events just like this one. And after debating hundreds of individuals, I can say that while I may forget the talking points, I can usually remember the overall feeling. This was just such an occasion. I could feel his hatred. This man hated who I was. What I was.
<div id="attachment_958347" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958347" class="size-large wp-image-958347" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-407x576.jpg" alt="Credit: David Zimand" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-02-31-PM-4724-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes=" (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" />Credit: David Zimand</div>
It was only as his story at Columbia University broke into the news that a photographer-friend who had taken a picture of our encounter messaged me to ask if I realized who that was shouting at my face back in Washington Square Park: It was Mahmoud Khalil and his now-wife standing behind him as she nodded along with what he said.
And here’s what gets me: The media elevate voices like his because they somehow echo part of the cultural anger. We cut them slack, grant them platforms, then pat ourselves on the back for “honest debate.” But is shouting like a cheerleader for genocide really “honest”? Or is it moral abdication?
We treat his bloodlust as just another datapoint in a “heated discussion.” We ignore that he stands for rejoicing in the death of children. We gloss over the fact that someone who rationalizes cold-blooded massacre is someone we wouldn’t let babysit our own kids. Yet the legacy media puts them on a rhetorical pedestal and hands them the microphone.
Why do we give leeway to a man whose heart harbors hatred we’d recoil from in our personal lives? Because we in the West neutralize his crime into a “viewpoint” — and pretend there’s no difference between demanding justice and celebrating murder.
This is the hate-validation fallacy: assuming that any hatred we share is enough to legitimize the most extreme expressions of it. The media embrace the worst apologists for atrocity, then wonder why society feels more fractured than ever. Somehow, when it comes to Israel, this fallacy is dialed up to 11.
Are we so starved for certainty that we’ll champion the vilest among us just to prove we’re right? When did we decide that the loudest hate gets respect, while decency gets dismissed as propaganda?
Hamas stands for exulting in death — of Jews and their own people. There is no moral middle ground. And anyone who celebrates terror doesn’t have a “perspective” worth quoting — they’re a warning sign of how low discourse can sink.
That day in Washington Square Park, I saw his contempt up close. I saw how easily we can excuse the worst people when they confirm our biases. And I knew: if we don’t draw a line here, we lose more than a debate — we lose our humanity.
So, the next time you see a genocide apologist splashed across your feed, ask yourself: am I amplifying truth or validating hate? Because there’s a world of difference between making a point and aiding a monster.
We owe it to ourselves — and to every innocent life — to choose wisely. Reject the hate-validation fallacy. Refuse to give hate a stage. And remember: some voices deserve nothing but silence.
* * *
A.J. Edelman is an Israeli Olympian and captain of Israel’s Edelman Bobsled Team, a mixed Jewish/Druze team training for the 2026 Olympic Games, and in line to become Israel&#8217;s first ever multi-sport Olympian. When not sliding down mountains he is a writer and commentator.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Menu