I was praying in a bomb shelter last week. It wasn’t in the “There are no atheists in foxholes” category. My synagogue has moved to the shelter of the old-age home where we regularly meet. And I was praying that this never seems “normal.” It should never become routine to hold religious services, children’s activities, and cultural events in shelters because of the threat of missile attacks.
I added fervent prayers for something else – that my friends and family abroad, thousands of kilometers away from the falling rockets, were also safe. Jews everywhere are at risk.
Since the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity on October 7, 2023, Israel has been under attack from seven fronts, all linked to the Iranian regime. Even before it responded to the terrorist assault in which 1,200 were massacred and 251 were abducted to Gaza, Israel was attacked on another non-physical front – antisemitism has become weaponized.
Described by the late historian Robert Wistrich as “The world’s longest hatred,” antisemitism takes different forms over the centuries, but it doesn’t disappear. It’s a disease that might remain dormant in the body for years before it suddenly erupts. And it’s deadly.
On Saturday, a friend suggested I start keeping a list of major antisemitic attacks around the world. This came in the wake of the terror attack at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on Thursday, March 12, when more than 100 children and staff at a Jewish daycare center had to be evacuated. This was followed the next day by two attacks in the Netherlands: an explosion at a Jewish school in Amsterdam and an arson attack on a synagogue in Rotterdam. During an online briefing this week, Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli reportedly said that an Iranian proxy group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), was behind the bombings in the Netherlands and at a historic synagogue in Liege, Belgium, last week.
There was also a security incident near the synagogue in Trondheim, Norway, last Thursday. Earlier this month, three Toronto synagogues were shot at in as many days. I’m praying this list hasn’t grown by the time you’re reading these lines.
Antisemitic attacks, spread of terror networks
Chikli voiced concern that terrorist networks affiliated with Iran are trying to expand operations in Europe, while US media have reported concerns that “sleeper cells” are being operated in America and elsewhere.
The attack on the synagogue close to Detroit was not a wake-up call. We are well past that stage. This is not an emergency alert; this is the emergency itself. Attacks on Jewish places of worship and community events have become mind-blowingly common.
The coverage of the Michigan assault created dangerous shock waves. Remember, the terrorist Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove a truck packed with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue and preschool with the intent to kill – or, more to the point, to commit mass murder. What sick mind does that? One sick with antisemitism. And what sick mind offers excuses? We immediately found out: minds not so much educated as indoctrinated. Years of anti-Israel culture on university campuses and mainstream media are paying off for their funders, including a primary sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar.
The focus swiftly moved from the victims – the Jewish toddlers whose lives Ghazali hoped to wipe out – to the terrorist, a 41-year-old naturalized American, originally from Lebanon, who died during the security forces’ response to the attack. True to form, The New York Times swiftly produced an “Explainer” under the (inaccurate) headline stating: “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of the Jewish state.” It was, as the Honest Reporting media watchdog succinctly summed up: “The journalistic equivalent of: ‘Well... what was she wearing?’”
The implication was clear: If the veteran Reform synagogue supported Israel, it got what it had coming to it.
The NYT was joined by several media outlets – including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, and The Guardian – in producing a sob story narrative to “humanize” and contextualize the terrorist. Ghazali, we were told, was “a nice” restaurant worker who had lost relatives in Israeli strikes in Lebanon. The fact that these included two brothers who were members of the Hezbollah terrorist organization got lost in translation. Coverage of the steady bombardments from Lebanon and Iran on Israeli communities is also missing in action.
As The Jerusalem Post editorial summed up on Sunday: “Some commentary did not simply report the family deaths as possible background; it framed the attack as a kind of understandable overflow from the war, as though grief could convert an attempted massacre at a Jewish preschool into something politically legible rather than morally monstrous.
“Responsible reporting can note family tragedy, radicalization, anger, or ideology. But the moment those details are used to soften judgment, something has gone badly wrong. Nobody would accept that logic if the target had been any other minority school, church, mosque, or daycare center. Only when Jews are attacked does there seem to be such eagerness in some quarters to widen the frame until the attacker begins to look less like a perpetrator and more like a vessel for history.”
Beefing up security acts as a Band-Aid. It is not a solution. The terror attacks will not abate as long as there is a climate in which antisemitism in certain circles is not only acceptable but expected. Not, of course, that all those who foster antisemitism would admit to it. Today’s antisemitism comes in many guises, including anti-Zionism, anti-Israel ideology, and Tucker Carlson’s perverted screeds. There is even a distorted form of “global environmental protection,” à la Greta Thunberg and Irish novelist Sally Rooney.
As Brendan O’Neill noted in The Telegraph, “With ocean-going pomposity, [Rooney] said we brave few who stand up for Palestine are standing up for the planet itself. Humanity’s very ‘future on this earth’ depends on us...”
Rooney was addressing a group in Amsterdam when, as O’Neill put it, she “unwittingly confirmed that ‘Palestine’ is now little more than a moral prop in the lives of bored middle-class millennials.
“She told her fawning audience that Palestine solidarity is the great cause of our time because: ‘What else... can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves, and to fight for our future?’
“Standing with Palestine is the only thing that can ‘make our lives endurable,’ she said.”
To hell with Iranian-funded Palestinian terror attacks and rocket bombardments, the main thing is to ensure Rooney doesn’t die of boredom.
The UK’s Union of Jewish Students issued a disturbing report this month. Its findings included that: “Antisemitism has become normalized on our campuses. One in four students (23%) have seen behavior that targets Jewish students for their religion/ethnicity”; “student groups have explicitly called for violence against Jews, even justifying the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in December 2025 [where 15 people were massacred];” “49% of students have heard slogans or chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed groups on campus. 47% have witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks, rising to 77% among those who encounter Israel-Palestine protests regularly.”
The report concluded that stronger and better enforced regulation is necessary against antisemitism and hate crimes on campus. It’s a start, but the question is how to change the atmosphere in which students and staff thought this behavior was acceptable in the first place.
There’s such a moral inversion that acting against Israel and Jews is carried out in the name of human rights. Look no further than the demonstrations last weekend marking Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day, an annual pro-Palestinian event established by Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The London demonstration was organized by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Irony is not dead if supporters of the Islamic Republic regime do so in the name of “human rights.” That’s the regime that oppresses women, kills gays, and persecutes religious and ethnic minorities. And pro-regime protesters obviously prefer to ignore the massacre of some 30,000 demonstrators within 48 hours by that same regime in Iran.
A bright light came from the counter-protesters, many carrying Israeli flags and pre-revolution Iranian flags. A video clip showed Iranian exiles and Jewish supporters together listening to the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” “The Hope.”
Hope depends on good people standing up against the genocidal regime with nuclear ambitions. It isn’t Israel’s existence that is threatened but the very values that once defined the West.