Antisemitism is on the march across the world, although its proponents try to hide it under the label of “anti-Zionism” or “criticizing Israel.” Those euphemisms leave them free to call for exterminating a tiny, humanist nation that just coincidentally is officially Jewish, while ignoring the myriad countries around the world that engage in the most anti-human behaviors (many of which are Israel’s mortal enemies).
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As a Jew, I care, especially because I have no wish to see another compound with the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” displayed at the entrance. But I believe everyone should care. Why? Because antisemitism is the harbinger of the death of liberty within a country, not just for the beleaguered Jews, who are the canaries in the coal mine, but for everyone else, too.
Rising antisemitism around the world is a problem. Most recently in the U.S., Rep. Ro Khanna, the multi-multi-multi-millionaire (a marriage thing, with a fabulously wealthy wife whose trades have created a serious appearance of impropriety and questions about conflicts of interest), went out of his way to create a fake international incident tarring Israel and its citizens as dangerous rogue militias out to attack American congressmen. The truth, of course, was somewhat different:
Let’s not lose our grip on the facts – instead of recriminations and accusations – just the facts.
— Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter (@yechielleiter) July 13, 2026
1) Congressman @RoKhanna was offered to coordinate his visit with the State of Israel – this goes beyond notifying of his presence in the country. He was offered in-depth…
Khanna didn’t do this because he’s a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite. He did it because he believes he can be president and, in today’s Democrat party, antisemitism is an important stepping stone to national prominence. That’s because the Democrat party is now a Marxist party, unrelated to its past as a patriotic, workingman’s party as it was during the mid-20th century (although I would argue, very closely related to its slavery history). Its modern Marxist goals are bigger government and smaller people.
And with those goals comes the inevitable Jew hatred: Marx was a virulent antisemite, and Hitler’s fascism was Marxian socialism, complete with antisemitism, differentiated only by a “private ownership under government control” twist.
In America, it’s not just the Democrats who now see bashing the world’s only Jewish nation as a path to power. People who once claimed allegiance to the Republican party—e.g., Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Joe Kent, and others—are steeped in antisemitism, which they carefully paint as hatred for the “rogue,” “genocidal” nation of Israel.
If you glance at Tucker’s output, the former middle-of-the-road Fox News host is now a fan of the world’s tyrannies and a paranoid maniac when it comes to America’s most stalwart ally and the only liberal democratic republic in the entire antisemitic swath of land that bands the globe from West Africa to Eastern Russia. It’s no coincidence that Tucker now happily hosts talks with some of the left’s most virulent antisemites. They have coalesced around a common cause.
Travel abroad, and you’ll see the same. Most recently, I saw that Australia, a formerly free nation that showed its new totalitarian incarnation during COVID (not all regions, but the national government and many regions), is now one of the most antisemitic countries in the world. The same is true for the United Kingdom. We learned our liberties from the UK, but it, too, has become one of the world’s most antisemitic—and least free—countries.
Today, you can skip your way across the map and find this pattern endlessly repeated: When individual liberty vanishes, antisemitism rises.
And that’s why Andrew Klavan so memorably called antisemitism “the Devil’s flagpole.” As he argued in his 2024 essay on the subject, antisemitism, both historically and in modern times, never arises in a vacuum. When you see it, it is a warning that bad things are happening:
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Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole. It always marks the place where evil dwells. It adheres to no one political party, no particular race or nation. But wherever and whenever it appears, it is a signal that something is going very badly wrong in that place and time.
For Klavan, antisemitism is hatred of God, who stands for everything tyrannies hate—individual worth, a power greater than the state, and objective moral values. Klavan, a Christian convert, sees this all through the filter of Christianity, but I would expand it to the Biblical God, whether Old or New Testament:
Because the soul of the West was indelibly shaped by Christianity, the God of the West is the Jewish God, the God of Abraham made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Western ideas about God — that he made both men and women in his image, that he identifies with the least among us, that his personality is centered on forgiveness and love — these ideas were all gifts of I AM to his Chosen People. So too were the laws carved on the stones of Sinai and etched over slow centuries into the animate substance of the Jewish heart.
Klavan’s essay is an important one: Antisemitism isn’t hatred of the Jews. It’s hatred of all that is good. And believe me, I’m not saying that all Jews are good or that you should instantly convert to Judaism as the one true faith. That’s a manifestly silly argument.
What I am saying, though, is that for antisemites, Jews are the people who first brought God to the world. For that reason, their very existence is a stand-in symbolizing God’s goodness, morality, and the value he assigned to each individual life. That’s why, when people and cultures cease to believe in those things, their first line of attack is Jews.
Importantly—and here’s why all of you should care about rising antisemitism—once those toxic values take hold, the Jews are never their last victims.
Across time and space, throughout history, where Jew hatred goes—where the Devil’s flag is planted—everyone suffers. Rapacious governments and evil people use antisemitism as the tip of the sword for tyrannies that will, eventually, destroy all within their path.
Today, those rapacious governments and evil people, while carrying the Devil’s flag, march under two other banners: Islam and leftism.
The Devil’s flagpole is beginning to fly across America. It’s time we all take a stand, whether we’re Jewish or not, because the evil behind that flagpole will eventually come for everyone.
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