How rhetoric arms antisemitic violence

The worldwide rise of antisemitic and anti-Israel hate rhetoric on college campuses and in street protests and on the internet since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 has fueled growing antisemitic and anti-Israel violence and threats. The murders of two Israeli diplomats following a Jewish event in Washington Wednesday night is just the latest horrifying manifestation.

This is not a matter of conjecture — it is a matter of record. The FBI’s Hate-Crime Statistics program shows that when public discourse turns openly antisemitic, crime data soon registers the echo. Between 2022 and 2023, reported antisemitic hate-crime incidents in the United States jumped 63% — the steepest single-year rise in the FBI’s dataset — just months after celebrity influencers and political candidates mainstreamed conspiratorial attacks on “globalist” Jewish power.

The Department of Homeland Security’s annual Homeland Threat Assessments (2021–2024) warns that ideologically motivated lone actors or small cells frequently draw inspiration from online antisemitic narratives. And the Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 Audit recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023, the highest number since the survey began in 1979; roughly one-third of those incidents referenced “Israel” or “Zionism” and many occurred after the Hamas terrorist attack.

Consider Pittsburgh. In 2018, Robert Bowers murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue after posting on Gab that the refugee-aid group HIAS “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Open-source analyses of Gab’s full archive show that explicitly antisemitic conspiracy frames — most notably the “Great Replacement” narrative and the “ZOG” (Zionist-Occupied Government) trope — were already climbing in frequency across 2017-2018 and feature heavily in Bowers’ own posts.

Radicalization research suggests that such recurring conspiratorial memes can operate as an ideological bridge, converting a diffuse grievance (“Jews are orchestrating white displacement”) into a personalized, tactical sense of emergency that makes violence seem both necessary and imminent.

Or take the Jan. 15, 2022 hostage crisis in Colleyville, Texas. British citizen Malik Faisal Akram — who had been dropped from MI5 watch-lists after a short, mid-level inquiry in late 2020 — entered Congregation Beth Israel, held four worshippers at gun-point and repeated conspiratorial claims about Jewish power.

U.K. journalists later learned that in the months before the attack Akram binged hours of Urdu-language YouTube sermons by clerics such as the late Dr. Israr Ahmed, whose videos brand Jews “the ultimate source of evil” and “agents of Satan.” Those clips circulated widely in British-Pakistani WhatsApp networks.

MI5 had missed the accelerant effect of online propaganda and his diet of a ready-made narrative in which Jews orchestrate Muslim humiliation, making a violent “rescue mission” for Aafia Siddiqui seem urgent. In other words, the pathway from grievance to action was remote and decentralised — no handler, just an algorithmically reinforced echo-chamber.

Modern international jurisprudence backs the point. In its December 2003 “Media Case” judgment (Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza & Ngeze), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted the co-founder of the RTLM radio station, Ferdinand Nahimana, of direct and public incitement to genocide.

The Trial Chamber found that RTLM’s broadcasts — saturating the airwaves with portrayals of Tutsi as inyenzi (“cockroaches”), naming individual targets and urging listeners to “take up arms” — did not merely echo existing hatred: they “loaded the gun” for genocide.

As the judges put it, “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences.” Because such propaganda created the mental climate that made mass killing seem necessary, the Chamber held Nahimana responsible even where no operational orders were issued on-air; repetitive dehumanising speech itself was enough to satisfy the offence of incitement.

Regarding Jews, in 1945 student-led strikes and marches that began at Cairo University, al-Azhar, and other campuses merged with nationalist and mosque-based rallies, igniting the Balfour Day riots in Cairo and Alexandria. Anti-Zionist pamphlets circulated at the universities and sermons at al-Azhar cast local Jews as “agents” of British imperialism. Five Jews and one Muslim policeman were killed, between 400 and 670 people were wounded. Jewish property across both cities was ransacked and at least one synagogue was burned to the ground.

Nazi Germany offers a darker lesson: By late 1933, many Heidelberg students wore SA armbands and harassed or beat Jewish classmates — abuses documented as early as 1931 and often tolerated by faculty. The ideological fuel came from courses in “racial hygiene” and “population biology,” which framed antisemitism as medical science.

Psychiatrist Carl Schneider lectured at Heidelberg, while the intellectual hub was Otmar von Verschuer’s Institute for Hereditary Biology in Frankfurt. Verschuer’s textbooks and seminars cast Jews as threats to the “Aryan gene pool,” legitimizing violence as biological defense. Campus attacks became the practical arm of classroom theory, forming a feedback loop between pseudoscience and persecution.

Stalin’s anti–“rootless cosmopolitan” campaign — a veiled purge of Jewish intellectuals — began in late 1948 and was formally launched with central press editorials in Pravda (Jan. 28, 1949) and Kultura i Zhizn (Jan 30), then amplified by journals such as Literaturnaya Gazeta and Voprosy Istorii. Arrests had already begun in December 1948.

The repression escalated through interrogations and show trials, culminating in the execution of 13 Yiddish writers on Aug. 12, 1952, known as the “Night of the Murdered Poets” and the arrest of mostly Jewish doctors in the fabricated “Doctors’ Plot” of January 1953.

Outside formal state systems, the same dynamic reappears. The 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires — the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust — was carried out by Iran-backed Hezbollah operatives. Yet one allegation held that far-right Argentine officers, long immersed in antisemitic propaganda, provided support in explosives.

When the National Socialist Party of America announced plans for a 1977 march in Skokie, Ill. — then home to many Holocaust survivors — its flyers and slogans cast Jews as hostile “enemies” of white America and encouraged harassment.

In Russia, beginning in the early 1990s, newly deregulated ultra-nationalist media — most visibly the weekly Den’, later rebranded as Zavtra, along with fringe talk shows — saturated newsstands and airwaves with claims that “Zionists” had engineered the collapse of the USSR and now controlled post-Soviet Russia from behind the scenes.

Over the next decade, those narratives migrated from screen to street. In March 1999, vandals attacked Novosibirsk’s only synagogue, shredding Torah scrolls and scrawling swastikas and the initials “RNE” — the exact symbols and slogans featured in Russian National Unity propaganda and cable-access broadcasts.

This is the overwhelming record: more hate rhetoric against Jews and Israel leads to more threats against Jews and Israel leads to more violence against Jews and Israel.

During the day Wednesday in New York there were anti-Israel protests and arrests at Columbia University during the school’s graduation. On Wednesday night a gunman saying the same slogans murdered two exiting a reception hosted by the American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. The rhetoric–violence connection is real and dangerous, putting vulnerable communities at risk.

Rhetoric does not pull the trigger — but it loads the gun, primes the hand, and sanctifies the shot.

Caro is a political and military analyst. He has written numerous articles in the U.S. and Israel about security and foreign affairs.