Since the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, the world has once again found itself reckoning with an ancient evil dressed in modern rhetoric. The bloodshed, the destruction, and the deep human suffering on all sides demand sober reflection and moral clarity. Yet beneath the legitimate debates about military tactics, proportionality, and humanitarian crises, there is something darker taking root, a toxin creeping back into our collective bloodstream: antisemitism.
It begins innocently enough, disguised as political critique. It sounds reasonable at first, a condemnation of Israeli policy, a concern for Palestinian lives, a call for peace. But before long, the mask slips. The conversation turns from government actions to collective blame. The finger-pointing leaps oceans and borders, landing not on generals or politicians, but on Jewish students, business owners, journalists, and families across the world. Suddenly, a people, not a policy, are placed on trial.
This is no coincidence. It is a pattern as old as history itself. Every time civilization teeters between reason and madness, antisemitism is one of the first indicators that reason is losing ground.
The Seed of Hatred and the Fruit of Delusion
Antisemitism has always been a spiritual sickness before it is a social one. It begins with envy, a resentment of a people who have preserved faith, identity, and excellence across millennia of persecution. But when that envy is not repented of, it festers into conspiracy. Conspiracy into hatred. Hatred into delusion.
The person who embraces antisemitic ideas begins a descent into ideological insanity because antisemitism is built on lies that require ever more lies to sustain. It is an addiction of the mind. Like all addictions, it rewires perception, replacing reality with paranoia.
They start with whispers: “The Jews control the media.” Then: “They manipulate the banks.” And when confronted with evidence to the contrary, the response is never correction, but escalation: “Ah, but that’s what they want you to think!” This is not critical thinking; it is the surrender of thought altogether.
Once someone accepts a worldview that makes a small group of people the secret cause of all evil, they have inoculated themselves against truth. From there, the journey toward ideological madness accelerates. The same mind that blames Jews for wars will soon blame them for pandemics, recessions, or social unrest. The logic of antisemitism always expands, never contracts.
As C.S. Lewis once observed, “The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs, he relies on our dislike of one to draw us into the other.” Antisemitism, too, is one of those paired errors. It pretends to be anti-oppression but ends up championing oppression. It claims to resist power but seeks to destroy those who have persevered by faith, not by force.
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