There is a disturbing, manipulative trend sweeping through many Jewish spaces today: the false victimhood of the hateful. This phenomenon doesn’t reveal that antisemites are somehow marginalized or wronged. It exposes a far more sobering truth: Jewish spaces are no longer safe for Jews who wish to share their joy, their pain, or their pride without being harassed, condemned, or blamed by those still clinging to an ideology that should have ended in 1945.
While antisemites pose as victims, they stalk, harass, and abuse Jews within our own communal spaces. But we see through the propaganda. We are not a people who allow our light to be dimmed. We are not a people who let our dead be erased under the flags of a country that never existed and never will. We will no longer stay silent while abusers masquerade as the oppressed.
We saw this grotesque inversion in full force after the Bondi Beach massacre last week, on the first night of Chanukah. Almost immediately, Jewish victims of a public terror attack were reframed online as perpetrators. Instead of mourning the lives lost and the trauma inflicted, bad-faith voices rushed to dissect the victims’ identities, politics, and supposed affiliations—searching not for truth, but for justification.
Sympathy was replaced with suspicion. AI-generated images of Jewish leaders facing imminent death were circulated as grotesque spectacle. Jewish pain was recast as provocation. This is how false victimhood operates in real time: Jews are attacked, and then accused of causing the attack simply by existing. Even as the violence remains fresh, the priority becomes preserving the fiction that Jews are never victims—only villains.
They claim they’re being “canceled” for sharing “opinions.” They say they’re “just asking questions.” They accuse “Zionists” of controlling the media, of shutting down dissent. “Zionism isn’t antisemitism,” they declare, wielding it as a shield whenever they are confronted for abusing Jews in Jewish spaces. They infiltrate our synagogues, our hostage rallies, our universities—places where Jews are simply trying to exist—and then cry oppression when they are asked to leave.
They call antisemitism a courageous stand against power. In truth, it’s recycled, cowardly hate.
It’s the moral equivalent of a bank robber blaming the teller for going to jail. Jews do not invade spaces, incite abuse, and then cry victim. Organized movements and extremist subcultures do.
And this is not new.
Nazi propaganda in the 1930s painted Jews as global conspirators, accusing them of controlling banks, media, and governments. Hitler’s regime convinced millions that Jews were victimizing Germany—justifying genocide under the lie of self-defense. History settled that lie. Through documentation, testimony, and scholarship, we know the truth: it was never the Jews who were the problem. It was the Nazis.
And yes, it was six million.
The word genocide was first used to describe the Armenians. The second time, it was used for the Holocaust.
Today, the same script is playing out—only now it comes with hashtags. They chant “from the river to the sea,” a slogan not of coexistence, but of elimination. They flood social media with Holocaust denial, despite overwhelming forensic, documentary, and eyewitness evidence. Confronted with facts, they reply with mockery, grotesque imagery, and dehumanizing caricatures pulled straight from Nazi archives.
They accuse Jews of dual loyalty and global domination—echoes of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery long since debunked. And when Jews call it out, the response is always the same: cries of censorship, calls for “debate” without evidence, dismissal of sources they themselves demanded, and claims of persecution while engaging in harassment.
But we know our truth. It is the truth. We are not required to endlessly reprove our history, our humanity, or our right to safety to those committed to denying all three.
This is not about silencing dissent. It is about recognizing a pattern that history has taught us to take seriously. When a group is targeted and then blamed for being targeted—when violence is justified as resistance, and lies are laundered as questions—we are no longer in the realm of honest disagreement.
We are watching the normalization of a dangerous inversion, one that has always preceded real harm. Jews are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for honesty, for consistency, and for the most basic recognition: that hatred does not become righteous just because it’s loud, popular, or rebranded.
History is not subtle about where this leads.
We are speaking now because we have learned what happens when people do not.