The Cry of 'Antisemitism' Is a Weapon. I Just Realized It's Pointed at Us.

For years, my keyboard was my sword and shield in what I considered a fight for justice. And a key part of that fight was to dismantle, dismiss, and delegitimize the accusation of 'antisemitism.' In my columns, in late-night debates, in every fiber of my being as a critic, I saw it as a transparently cynical tool. A bludgeon. A conversation-ending smear designed to silence legitimate, necessary criticism of state power and military action. I argued, with all the conviction I could muster, that a chant at a music festival was just cathartic anger, that a politician's refusal to bow to pro-Israel lobbies was an act of courage, and that campus unrest was the righteous voice of a new generation. I saw the accusations as a distraction, a disingenuous tactic to shield power from accountability. I was, I now understand with chilling clarity, catastrophically wrong.

My intellectual fortress, so carefully constructed, did not fall in a single siege. It was eroded by a relentless tide of facts I had chosen to ignore. The first cracks appeared where I was most comfortable: in the cultural sphere. When footage of the 'Death to the IDF' chant at the Glastonbury festival surfaced, my instinct was to defend it. It's punk rock, I told myself. It's Bob Vylan. It's about an army, not a people. It’s raw, anti-war sentiment, the kind we should encourage. I dismissed the pearl-clutching as a coordinated campaign. But then the story refused to die. It crossed the Atlantic. The U.S. Department of Justice—not some fringe lobbying group, but the federal government's premier law enforcement agency—announced its Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was assessing the band's upcoming U.S. tour. Suddenly, this wasn't about a mosh pit in Somerset. It was a matter of international security. The conversation had shifted from cultural criticism to counter-terrorism, and my simple explanations felt dangerously naive.

Then came the undeniable link. Reports began to solidify the connection between Bob Vylan and the Irish group Kneecap, a band he had praised. It turned out a member of Kneecap wasn't just edgy; he had been charged under the UK's Terrorism Act for allegedly displaying pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah symbols. The chain was now complete and horrifyingly clear: a mainstream progressive artist, celebrated in our circles, was publicly aligned with sympathizers of designated terrorist organizations. The 'guilt by association' I once decried was now an undeniable chain of custody for a toxic ideology. My defense of 'it's just art' collapsed under the weight of actual terror legislation.

While I was reeling from that, the political front I thought we were winning imploded on national television. I had held up politicians like New York's Zohran Mamdani as beacons. I saw him as unafraid to speak truth to power, a voice for the voiceless. When he went on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' I expected him to deftly parry the inevitable 'gotcha' questions. Instead, he walked directly into the trap I had assured everyone didn't exist. Asked to condemn the slogan 'globalize the intifada'—a call for violent uprising—he refused. He equivocated. He intellectualized it. He gave a non-answer that was, in itself, a deafening answer. The very next day, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the highest-ranking Democrat in the House, went on ABC and publicly urged Mamdani to 'clarify' his stance. This wasn't an attack from the right-wing press. This was a public rebuke from the heart of his own party's leadership. The schism was not a manufactured narrative; it was a real, gaping wound, bleeding out on prime-time television. We weren't just a fringe; we were becoming a liability, sheltering an extremism that even our allies could no longer stomach.

Even the campus, the hallowed ground of progressive thought, became a landscape of horror. I had always framed the university protests as a battle of ideas. The lawsuits filed by Jewish students? I saw them as attempts to monetize hurt feelings and chill free speech. But the story shifted from the abstract to the specific. A new lawsuit filed against MIT didn't just name the institution; it named a tenured professor. It accused him of direct, personal harassment and doxing of his own Jewish students. This wasn't about a controversial speaker or a heated debate on the quad. This was a professor, a man with institutional power and a duty of care, allegedly using his position to terrorize young people. The rot wasn't at the gates; it was in the faculty lounge. The safe spaces we claimed to be building were becoming hunting grounds.

But the moment my intellectualizations turned to ash in my mouth had nothing to do with Washington, television studios, or university lawsuits. It was a small, sickening news item from France. A 12-year-old Jewish schoolboy, lured into a cellar by other children. They threatened him with a knife. They called him a 'Dirty Jew.'

Reading those words, the entire flimsy structure of my cynical worldview came crashing down. The chants, the political evasions, the academic justifications—it all led here. To a dark room, a terrified child, and a blade. All the complex geopolitical arguments, all the critiques of state policy, all the 'whataboutisms' are meaningless in the face of that primal, ancient hatred. We, in the opposition, in our righteous quest to hold power to account, have become useful idiots for the oldest bigotry. We meticulously deconstructed the 'weaponization' of the word 'antisemitism' while ignoring the very real weaponization of antisemitism itself. We have allowed a poison to flourish in our own movements, convincing ourselves it was medicine. We were so obsessed with the idea of a false cry of 'wolf' that we failed to see the wolves at our own door, sharpening their knives.