Trump isn’t fighting antisemitism. He’s targeting critics of Israel

The keffiyeh and watermelons are antisemitic symbols.

That’s according to training that the New York Police Department received in January from outfits closely associated with the pro-Israel community. The US magazine Jewish Currents, which obtained details about the training, questioned the focus of the presentation.

“They are actively conflating any care for Palestinian humanity or rights – and in some cases, Palestinian existence itself – with antisemitism,” Dove Kent, the US senior director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that battles antisemitism and its weaponisation, told Jewish Currents. “None of this does anything to increase Jewish safety.”

Barely a week goes by without mainstream media and Zionist groups telling the public that antisemitism is at record highs.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, recently went on CNN to detail his organisation’s new research, which asserts that antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed by 10 times since 2015.

But the ADL acknowledges that 58 percent of the 9,354 incidents assessed in 2024 were “related to Israel or Zionism”. According to this logic, if a protester at an American university shouts: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, this is antisemitic speech that threatens Jews.

Peaceful anti-genocide activism is framed as inherently suspicious. This is why groups such as the ADL advocate the censoring of popular social media apps, because “we really have a TikTok problem” – namely, a younger generation that isn’t pro-Israel enough.