The record is not ambiguous.

In 2012, before she reached Congress, Ilhan Omar wrote that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and asked God to “open the eyes of the people to its evil doings.” She later apologized. In February 2019, as a sitting member, she answered a question about pro-Israel lobbying with “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” then named AIPAC. Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, demanded she reject antisemitism. She apologized and immediately reaffirmed the charge. Weeks later she said advocates for Israel were pushing “allegiance to a foreign country” — the dual-loyalty smear, aimed this time at American Jews and their allies. In 2021 she grouped the United States and Israel with Hamas and the Taliban as perpetrators of “unthinkable atrocities.” A dozen Jewish House Democrats rebuked her. She said she had not meant a moral equivalence. The pattern is the point: the trope, the ritual apology, the restatement.

Rashida Tlaib made the slogan explicit. After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre — about 1,200 people murdered, more than 200 taken hostage, civilians burned and raped — she amplified “from the river to the sea” and called it “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” The Anti-Defamation League and a long list of Jewish organizations hear that line as a call to erase the Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. So did fellow Democrats. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, called the post cruel. Senator Jacky Rosen said it rejects a two-state outcome and puts Jews in danger. In November 2023 the House censured Tlaib, 234–188. Twenty-two Democrats voted yes. One hundred eighty-four voted no. In April 2024, a resolution declaring the slogan antisemitic drew 43 Democratic no votes, including Omar, Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush.

This is not a dispute about settlements or Netanyahu. It is a dispute about whether a Jewish country is allowed to exist.

The organizational left that feeds the party has been blunter. Chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America responded to October 7 by framing the massacre as resistance. The Salt Lake City chapter said it was “not terrorism or anti-semitism to fight against this injustice.” Pittsburgh’s chapter said violent opposition was inevitable and that the conflict ends only if the “apartheid regime is lifted from the river to the sea.” New York DSA promoted a rally in Times Square the day after the slaughter. In an August 2026 interview with The New Yorker, DSA national co-chair Megan Romer said she “probably would have” gone, called October 7 “largely inevitable,” described Gaza as an “open-air concentration camp,” and said any U.S. defense or economic support for Israel is a “solid red line.” She described the DSA’s end state as a free Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem — a one-state outcome. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman condemned the immediate post-massacre rallies. The machine that endorsed them did not change its line. Ocasio-Cortez later lost the DSA’s endorsement after sitting on an antisemitism panel and backing Iron Dome funding.

The base has followed the activists, not the old foreign-policy hands. Gallup reported in February 2025 that only 33 percent of Democrats viewed Israel favorably and 60 percent viewed it unfavorably — the first time a major-party group had crossed into majority hostility. Republican favorability sat at 83 percent. By early 2025, Gallup also found 59 percent of Democrats sympathizing more with the Palestinians and 21 percent more with the Israelis. A later Quinnipiac reading put the share of Democrats who believed Israel had committed genocide at 77 percent, with only 13 percent sympathizing more with Israelis. Pew has tracked a parallel drop in Democratic favorability toward the Israeli people themselves, not just the government. Treating “the Israeli people” as the object of dislike is not a policy argument. It is collective blame.

Jewish voters have noticed, and most of them have not left. A Jewish Electorate Institute survey found Democrats still leading 71–23 on the generic congressional ballot among Jewish voters, with 69 percent identifying as Democrats. The same voters said antisemitism is increasing inside the Democratic Party — 57 percent overall — and 35 percent of Jewish Democrats said the rise of anti-Israel candidates has made it harder to identify as Democrats. They are staying in a house that keeps telling them the smoke is just criticism of a foreign prime minister.

The street has been less theoretical. The ADL logged 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest total in 46 years of tracking, and 6,274 in 2025 — a one-third drop from the peak, still the third-highest year on record and about five times the level of a decade earlier. Nearly half of the 2025 incidents were tied to Israel or Zionism. Assaults with a deadly weapon rose. In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Witnesses said he pulled out a keffiyeh and shouted “Free, free Palestine.” He had been associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a far-left group, and a manifesto attributed to him called the murders morally justified as a way to “bring the war home.” A month later, Mohamed Soliman firebombed a Boulder march for Israeli hostages, killing one person. Antisemitic murder had returned to American soil for the first time since 2019.

None of that makes the Democratic Party a terrorist organization. It does describe a permission structure. “Globalize the intifada” was defended in the 2025 New York mayor’s race by Zohran Mamdani, the DSA-aligned Democrat who went on to win, as language a mayor should not police — a “desperate desire for equality,” he said, not a call to export the bus bombings and café massacres of the Second Intifada. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Dan Goldman, both Democrats, rebuked him. The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt called the slogan an explicit call for violence. Mamdani later said he would discourage the phrase. He did not treat it as disqualifying, and the primary electorate did not either. He is now mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country.

Defenders of this turn have a stock answer: anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and the right has bigots too. The second point is true and irrelevant to the first. Marjorie Taylor Greene has trafficked in conspiracy sludge. Groyper accounts and white nationalists still hunt Jews from the other flank. A party does not get a pass because its rival is also dirty. The IHRA working definition, which Omar has voted against endorsing, does not ban criticism of Israeli policy. It flags the moves that keep showing up in Democratic primaries: denying Jews the right of self-determination granted to everyone else, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel, and recycling the charge that Jewish political participation is bribery or foreign control.

What has changed since October 7 is not the existence of a left anti-Israel current. It is the current’s rank, its immunity, and its body count in rhetoric and, increasingly, in fact. The old Democratic leadership condemned Omar in 2019 and still could not stop her. It could not stop Tlaib’s censure from becoming a party split. It watched the sympathy numbers invert and called the inversion a debate about Gaza. Jewish Democrats are being asked to accept, as the price of coalition, politicians who will not say a Jewish state may exist between the river and the sea, and an activist left that called the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust inevitable.

That is not a messaging problem. It is the rise itself.

Poor Norman

www.poornorman.com

The post The Democratic Party’s Antisemitism Problem Is No Longer Fringe first appeared on Poor Norman News.

Let’s start with today’s news, because the illusion of safety is dying before our eyes. On December 14, 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach, two gunmen opened fire on a crowd of celebrants, killing at least 16 people, including a child, and injuring dozens more in what authorities immediately declared an antisemitic terrorist attack. Australian leaders called it a deliberate attack on Jews gathered for a religious festival. Explosive devices were even found near the scene.

This wasn’t a random act of violence. It was targeted, ideological, and murderous—a chilling escalation from rising antisemitic incidents across Australia over the last two years. Hate crimes such as synagogue firebombings, arson attacks, and vandalism surged sharply following the Gaza conflict in 2023.

That this massacre happened in a country once thought safe from such horror should be a wake-up call. But in the West, we rarely connect the dots between ideology, intolerance, and violence. Instead, we hear soothing phrases like “isolated incidents,” or “complex social problems.”

Let’s be clear: tolerance is not a suicide pact. Ignoring ideology that openly despises Jews and glorifies violence invites exactly this kind of catastrophe.

Europe’s Crisis: Paris Cancels New Year’s Eve Celebrations

Meanwhile, in France, authorities recently cancelled the traditional New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées—an event that typically draws millions—not because of snow or infrastructure issues, but because of threats to public safety tied to extremist violence and migrant-associated unrest in Parisian suburbs. Critics point directly at rising violence linked to poorly integrated immigrant communities, especially in areas dominated by Islamist radicalization and socioeconomic alienation.

This is what happens when governments refuse to enforce assimilation and security. Streets once teeming with cheer now carry a heavy security presence; celebrations are replaced with pre-recorded broadcasts and ominous warnings from police urging citizens to stay home.

France’s Jewish community has felt this shift acutely for years. Antisemitic abuse and attacks surged long before 2025, with synagogues, Holocaust memorials, and Jewish businesses repeatedly targeted.

This isn’t hypothetical fear-mongering. It’s reality.

Terrorist Attacks Aren’t “Blips”—They’re a Trend

Across the West, incidents once thought impossible are becoming alarmingly routine:

• In France, the Mulhouse stabbing attack in February 2025 saw a knife assault tied to militant Islamist extremism, killing a civilian and wounding officers. The perpetrator was a known extremist whom the state had tried—and failed—to deport.

• In the UK, the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 involved a vehicle and knife assault on worshippers during Yom Kippur, killing three and injuring others in a brazen terror act targeting Jews.

These incidents aren’t isolated blips; they’re symptomatic of a wider pattern: violent ideology crossing borders and exploiting gaps in enforcement, assimilation, and public discourse.

Why Leaders Refuse to Face the Truth

What’s most disturbing is not the violence itself—terrible as it is—but how Western institutions react:

• Politicians avoid naming Islamist extremism as a root cause.

• Media treats antisemitism as a side effect of geopolitics rather than an ideological grievance worth confronting directly.

• Law enforcement is reactive instead of preventative.

When a growing number of European mayors warned recently that antisemitism is at crisis levels, they were met with platitudes rather than decisive policy responses.

This silence and equivocation create an environment where extremists feel emboldened, and their violence metastasizes.

Not All Muslims Support Extremism—but Extremism Supports Violence

Let’s make this clear: criticizing Islamist extremism is not hatred against Muslims. It is confrontation with a political and religious ideology that explicitly uses religion as a vehicle for violence and antisemitism. Millions of Muslims reject violence and live peacefully. But the refusal to call out the radical elements—who use the same symbols and language as their peaceful co-religionists—is a strategic error with deadly consequences.

The events in Sydney, Paris, Manchester, Mulhouse, and other cities prove one thing: when extremist ideologies are left unchallenged, they breed violence. And when governments treat ideology as taboo, they cede public safety to those who don’t share Western values of pluralism and respect.

Conclusion: Western Societies Must Wake Up

We can no longer pretend that these incidents are anomalies. They are part of a global trend of ideological terrorism and antisemitic violence that respects no borders and targets innocent people during religious celebrations, public holidays, and national festivities.

Ignoring the phenomenon doesn’t make it go away. It empowers extremists and endangers Jews, Christians, secular citizens, and anyone who believes in open societies.

If Western leaders want to preserve civil order and protect all citizens, they must stop minimizing the problem, start naming the ideology fueling the violence, and begin policies that confront extremism at its roots. That is not prejudice—that is survival.

The post Islamist Extremism and the Global Surge in Antisemitism: The Brutal Truth the West Refuses to Name first appeared on Poor Norman News.