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Tuccille: Festering Jew hatred means even the U.S. isn't safe anymoreLast updated 1 day ago You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.A protester holds a "globalize the intifada" sign during an Anti-Israel protest near Prime Minter Benjamin Netanyahu's hotel at the 80th session of the UN’s General Assembly (UNGA) on September 25, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)Last month, after a survey found more than three-quarters of French Jews feel unsafe in their country, hundreds of French Jewish physicians gathered at an immigration fair to consider moving to Israel, the world’s only majority-Jewish country. “There is no future in France,” one told the Jewish News Syndicate. Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorHis words echoed those of Rabbi Avraham Gigi, the Chief Rabbi in Brussels, Belgium, who in 2015 after a rise in antisemitic attacks, warned, “People realize there is no future for Jews in Europe.” Now, with hostility on the rise against a minority that has long served as a punching bag for the world’s bigots, it’s fair to ask where there still is a future for Jews. This newsletter from NP Comment tackles the topics you care about. (Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againIn 1939, there were about 16.5 million Jews in the world, according to Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. By May 1945, the Second World War and the genocidal years of the Holocaust, 11 million Jews remained. As of 2024, numbers had recovered to 15.7 million, still short of the total in 1939. Whereas almost 60 per cent of Jews lived in Europe in 1939, that share is now down below 10 per cent. Roughly 45 per cent of all Jews now live in Israel, with another 40 per cent in the United States. The numbers become increasingly concentrated as safe havens disappear. “In the shadow of the war in Gaza, there was a surge in the number of cases of severe violence against Jews in the West in 2025,” according to the latest edition of an annual report on antisemitism published by Tel Aviv University. It added, “in every Western country, the total number of incidents remained dozens of percentage points higher than in 2022, the year preceding the war in Gaza.” On October 7, 2023, we should remember, Hamas launched a brutal and bloody attack across the Gaza border into Israel, killing over 1,200 Israelis. After Israel forcefully responded, many people perversely blamed Jews and the Jewish state, rather than their murderous tormenters. Unfortunately, one of the affected countries is Canada. B’nai Brith Canada reported last month that “2026 is already on track to be the most violent year for the Jewish community in recent memory.” Some Canadian Jews have moved or considered moving to the relative safety of the U.S. Israel is a refuge for obvious reasons, as the only country where Jews are a majority. The U.S. has also traditionally provided safe harbour for people who want to live in peace and to be left alone to do so. But the concentration of Jews in Israel has eased the way for bigots to, once again, reframe Jew-hatred — this time in post-modern, liberationist garb. They now call themselves “antizionists” to describe their opposition to the Zionist desire for an independent Jewish state as a haven for a beleaguered people. “Antizionism is anti-Israeli racism. It spreads libels about Israel” says anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein who points to “the core libels of antizionism today — colonizer, apartheid, and genocide.” Despite new terminology, “antizionism evolved from the older forms of Jew-hate. It evolved from classical antisemitism.” Louis-Klein points out that this is not the first time Jew-hatred has been repackaged. It was reinvented in the 19th century with a gloss of pseudoscientific racialism; haters coined the word “antisemitism” to describe their own modernized bigotry. The arguments are marketing; the hatred remains the same. Curious to probe any real differences between antizionism and antisemitism, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Samuel J. Abrams and Steven M. Cohen recently delved into the Fall 2025 Yale Youth poll. They discovered that respondents who oppose the existence of Israel also disproportionately embrace tropes about Jews being overpowerful in society and endorse collective punishment of Jewish Americans for the alleged crimes of Israel. “The claim that anti-Israel activism bears no relationship to antisemitism is no longer merely unconvincing,” they concluded. “It is empirically false.” As those results suggest, the U.S. has not been immune to the global surge in Jew-hatred. The hostility is obvious in the conduct of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) who, after election to Congress in 2018, defended her earlier claim that Israel “hypnotized the world,” was denounced by her own party’s leaders in 2019 for what they called “anti-Semitic comments made over Twitter” and was publicly slapped again in 2021 by 12 Jewish Democratic members of Congress for equating Israel with Hamas and the Taliban. Yet she continues to be nominated and returned to office by her party and her district’s voters.Figures including Hasan Piker on the far left and Nick Fuentes on the far right push bigotry back towards the mainstream. They’ve helped encourage a decline in support among the American public for Israel: “60 per cent of U.S. adults have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 per cent last year,” according to Pew Research. The shift is especially notable among Democrats and younger Americans. Anti-Israel views, as Abrams and Cohen point out, correlate strongly with explicit hostility to Jews. Interestingly, both Piker and Fuentes flirt with open totalitarianism. Piker endorses Communist China as a model society, and Fuentes embraces Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody who knows the totalitarian roots of the ideas behind antizionism. In an April report, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) examined how both communists and Nazis flipped morality on its head in their propaganda to reframe “tyranny as justice and evil as righteous action.” The report put some emphasis on “anti-Israel ideology, which played a central role in earlier anti-Western propaganda systems, including Soviet and Nazi campaigns, because the same narratives have reemerged today under the banner of antizionism.” Researchers digging into the funding for antizionist groups find authoritarian regimes hard at work. AEI’s Danielle Pletka reports “a web of connections between universities and overseas donors — chiefly Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — that helps cultivate an atmosphere in which antisemitic rhetoric can thrive.” NCRI calls out “a network linked to the Chinese Communist Party” and managed by wealthy American Marxist Neville Singham, who lives in Shanghai. The network promotes “anti-America and anti-Israel narratives” as well as hostility to capitalism and democracy. Jew-haters have never needed foreign funding to inspire them to be bigots. But, of course, authoritarian foreign regimes see advantage in channeling money to groups that want to undermine the tolerance and liberal norms of western societies and turn the inhabitants of nominally free and open countries against one another. Given the unfortunate history of Jew-hatred, Jews make an easy target since the embers of ancient hostilities can be fanned back to life. The question is whether liberal societies, like the U.S., can resist revived bigotry and continue to offer refuge to Jews. If not, given “antizionists’” hostility to liberal institutions, the rot won’t stop there. National Post Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. 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