Dear Editor,

We are witnessing, with a mixture of clinical detachment and visceral horror, a pandemic of Jew hatred that has effectively dissolved the polite fiction separating so-called anti-Zionism from raw, pre-modern bigotry.

In fewer than seven days this March 2026, the world recorded a relentless succession of targeted strikes against Jewish life: a synagogue bombed in Liège, Belgium; gunfire at two Toronto-area synagogues in a single night; suspicious individuals arrested near houses of worship in Oslo and Trondheim; two Jewish men beaten in San José, California after their assailants overheard them speaking Hebrew, allegedly shouting, “Don’t mess with Iran” and “[Expletive] the Jews” And then, West Bloomfield, Michigan.

On March 12, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali — a Lebanese-born naturalised American citizen flagged by government watchlists for contact with suspected Hezbollah members, and whose brothers were confirmed members of Hezbollah’s rocket unit — sat in the parking lot of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield for over two hours. He then drove a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks through the front doors of the nation’s largest Reform synagogue and opened fire. Inside were over 100 children, aged five and younger, in the synagogue’s early childhood centre. They survived because armed security guards stood between them and the truck.

The intellectual collapse on this point has been breathtaking. We are told, with extraordinary cynicism, that these attacks are “contextualised” — that the Jewish State’s prosecution of wars against the genocidal theocratic regime in Iran and its regional proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, renders Jewish communities worldwide into legitimate targets. It is a curious sociological phenomenon: the only conflict on Earth in which a child in a Michigan preschool is held liable for the tactical decisions of a sovereign Government 5,000 miles away. This is not political activism, it is the radicalisation of a pathogen we naively believed had been sterilised in the mid-20th century.

To understand the present, one must reckon honestly with a strain of Jew hatred that Western commentary habitually under-examines: the distinctive and deeply rooted tradition of pan-Arab and Islamist anti-Semitism. This is not merely a political grievance about land or statehood, it is a theo-ideological system with its own architecture. The Muslim Brotherhood wove Jew hatred into the structural DNA of modern political Islam; its founder Hassan al-Banna called for the obliteration of Israel, and its foremost ideologue Sayyid Qutb framed the Jewish people not as a political adversary but as a cosmic, metaphysical enemy of Islam itself. This eschatological framing — the belief that the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of Jewish sovereignty are not merely desirable but prophetically mandated — is the ideological spine of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime utilises State media, educational systems, and religious rhetoric to disseminate this content globally, with Ayatollah Khamenei repeatedly describing Israel as a “cancerous tumour” to be eradicated.

This is the language of exterminism. It did not emerge in a vacuum: Nazi Germany actively collaborated with Arab nationalist leaders during World War II, broadcasting Jew hatred across the Arab world via Radio Zeesen, blending Nazi racial theories with Islamic and nationalist rhetoric — a grotesque pollination whose fruit we are still harvesting. Pan-Arab nationalism then fused with this Islamist theology to produce a version of anti-Semitism uniquely resistant to moral argument, because it does not present itself as hatred. It presents itself as righteousness.

This Islamist stream now flows into — and amplifies — the broader river of Western progressive anti-Semitism. The Jewish State has been consciously cast as the “Jew of the global community”: the singular scapegoat onto which leaders who have failed at the basic tasks of domestic governance find it remarkably convenient to displace blame. Climate catastrophe, financial instability, human rights failures — all roads, in certain circles, lead back to the eternal Jew. It is the oldest sleight of hand in recorded history. And data confirms it is accelerating: global anti-Semitic incidents surged over 107 per cent in 2024 alone, with far-left ideological movements accounting for nearly 70 per cent of all recorded attacks by some estimates.

The term “anti-Semitism” was coined in the late 1800s as a pseudo-scientific euphemism — a way to make lawful Jew hatred in Germany appear modern and respectable. Today the term is laundered again, debated to exhaustion in faculty rooms and committee chambers until it loses its power to convict. But whether the hatred arrives wearing the robe of the Islamist ideologue, the blazer of the far-left academic, or the anonymity of the online agitator — the result is identical: an obsessive, singular hatred of Jewish people, Jewish institutions, and the Jewish homeland. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not parallel conversations, they are the same hatred wearing different clothing.

After the Holocaust — after the world stood at the gates of Auschwitz and made its promise — the civilised consensus was: Never again! That promise is being broken in parking lots and preschool hallways and synagogue doorways across the Western world. History is unambiguous on one point: This fire never stays confined to its first target. If the world continues to treat the targeting of Jewish life as a complicated political by-product rather than a civilisational emergency, it will discover — too late, as it always does — that it has surrendered its own foundations.

Francesca Tavares

francescatavares@yahoo.com