The Radical Stupidity of Modern Antisemitism — and the Enemy Inside the Gates

By Judd Dunning

The stupidity of antisemitism has no merit. It is simply bigotry, one of mankind’s oldest, ugliest and most irrational hatreds. There is nothing intellectually interesting about judging a person because he or she is Jewish, just as there is nothing intellectually defensible about judging an entire race, religion or ethnicity by the sins, politics or actions of somebody else who shares that identity. Yet somehow, in supposedly sophisticated America, antisemitism has again acquired an ideological costume that allows people who would never tolerate open racial prejudice against almost anyone else to rationalize their hatred of Jews as politics.

October 7th happened. That should not need to be written, but apparently it does. Hamas and other terrorists crossed into Israel, murdered approximately 1,200 people and took 251 human beings hostage. Americans were among those killed and kidnapped. The victims included young people at a music festival, families in their homes, children, elderly people and civilians who had committed no crime except waking up in Israel that morning. The United Nations subsequently found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture, occurred during the October 7 attacks and against hostages in captivity.

None of that means Israel is above criticism. Israel is a democracy. Democracies argue with themselves, change governments and make mistakes. Benjamin Netanyahu can be criticized. Israeli military tactics can be criticized. Settlements can be criticized. Gaza policy can be criticized. Israelis themselves do all of these things every day. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic any more than criticism of the United States is inherently anti-American.

But there is an enormous moral and intellectual difference between criticizing Israeli policy and becoming so intoxicated by an ideological narrative that the murder, kidnapping and rape of Jews become somehow less morally important. There is a difference between demanding restraint from Israel and expecting Israel to spend generation after generation tolerating terrorist armies on its borders for the comfort of the international community. Israel has been told repeatedly that it must absorb threats, rockets, terrorism and hostile armed organizations because removing those threats might destabilize the region. October 7 shattered that bargain. Israel has taken this political moment to clear out threats it had previously been told, implicitly or explicitly, to tolerate in the name of keeping the world at peace.

One can fiercely debate how Israel has conducted that war and still understand the fundamental reality that caused it. What one cannot rationally do is erase October 7, sanitize Hamas or transform Jewish victims into defendants in their own massacre. Yet that is precisely the moral inversion that has become fashionable on sections of the American left, particularly online.

That brings us to Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres and Hasan Piker.

Torres has done something increasingly uncommon in American politics: he has confronted extremism emanating from his own political side. In a letter to Amazon and Twitch, Torres called Piker “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America” and accused Twitch of amplifying his rhetoric to millions of people. Piker is not an anonymous internet troll. He is one of America’s largest political streamers and has become an increasingly significant figure in progressive politics.

Torres’s case against him is extraordinary. His letter cites Piker referring to Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and describing a Jewish man as a “bloodthirsty pig dog.” Torres also points to Piker’s treatment of the sexual atrocities of October 7, including his statement that “it doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.” The problem with that statement is not simply its vulgarity. It exposes the ideological disease underneath it: once you have assigned one group the role of oppressor and another the role of oppressed, facts that complicate the morality of the story cease to matter.

That is how otherwise intelligent people arrive at astonishing positions. Rape matters, except when acknowledging the rape might interfere with the narrative. Murder matters, except when the murdered people belong to the wrong side of the ideological ledger. Terrorism is evil, except when terrorists can be reclassified as “resistance.” Jews become “colonizers”; their killers become revolutionaries; and suddenly some of the most primitive forms of human hatred are being dressed up in the vocabulary of graduate seminars.

The easy answer for the intentionally fatigued is simply to tune out: “Israel has Trump in his pocket,” or “I don’t support Netanyahu because he has stayed in power too long.” But longevity in office, particularly during prolonged national crisis, is not itself proof of corruption or illegitimacy. Franklin Roosevelt was elected to third and fourth terms during the extraordinary circumstances of the Depression and World War II—before the 22nd Amendment imposed the presidential two-term limit. History is more complicated than a slogan. It is very easy for people who do not think deeply about that history, and who increasingly absorb their politics through TikTok, X and algorithmic outrage, to drift into a fringe where antisemitism is rationalized as political sophistication.

Piker’s record extends well beyond Israel. He famously declared, “America deserved 9/11.” He later argued that his remark concerned American foreign policy and has said that he opposes violence, but the words were his. He has said he had “no issue” with Hezbollah, according to Torres’s letter, and has praised the “brave mujahideen” in discussing the fighters who wounded Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL. Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with a long history of killing Americans, including involvement in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American service personnel.

The pattern matters. So does what has happened more recently.

In an August CNN program examining the rising progressive movement, Piker was questioned about his statement that, if presented the choice, he would vote for Hamas over Israel. When challenged about why he would make such a comparison, he continued defending his broader political analysis rather than abandoning it. The point is not that Piker literally has such a ballot available to him; obviously he does not. The importance is the moral hierarchy the statement reveals.

Meanwhile, Piker is becoming more, not less, important in Democratic electoral politics. He campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, urged his enormous audience to make calls for the campaign and was present in the political movement surrounding El-Sayed’s August 4 victory in the Democratic Senate primary. El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens and will now face Republican Mike Rogers in November in a race that could help determine control of the United States Senate.

This is where the story becomes considerably more important than Hasan Piker.

Abdul El-Sayed himself did not say America deserved 9/11. He has expressly said the opposite and recently called Piker’s remark “dumb.” That distinction should be stated plainly because guilt by association is an intellectually lazy substitute for examining what somebody actually believes. But El-Sayed has also dismissed criticism of his relationship with Piker as “gotcha politics,” and when asked after the primary whether he intended to appear with Piker again, he did not give a direct answer.

That is a legitimate question for somebody who wants to become a United States senator. If Hasan Piker’s public record is not enough to make him unacceptable political company, what would be?

That question became even more significant after El-Sayed won. Within days, Democrats began consolidating around him. Senate Democratic leaders who had supported his primary opponent moved toward party unity. El-Sayed spoke with Barack Obama and said he hoped the former president would campaign with him. That is normal party politics after a primary victory, but it also demonstrates why the Piker question can no longer be dismissed as an obscure internet controversy. El-Sayed is now the Democratic nominee for a Senate seat in one of America’s most consequential battleground states.

And Piker himself certainly does not appear to believe his political moment has passed. In a Vox interview published August 15, he discussed the Michigan victory, the progressive movement and the continuing struggle between democratic socialists and the Democratic establishment. He presented El-Sayed’s victory as part of evidence that this movement is gaining political strength, not retreating from the national stage.

There is another revealing episode unfolding at exactly the same time. The University of Washington recently canceled a Piker appearance that had been scheduled for its 2026-27 Speaker Series. The university said the internal planning process had failed to meet the necessary standard of rigor for university-hosted events and emphasized its commitment to the free exchange of ideas. Piker argued that his criticism of Israel was the real reason he had been excluded.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, then came to his defense on the free-speech issue, saying she had communicated her concerns directly to the university and encouraging students who wanted to hear Piker to work with the school.

I actually agree with the free-speech principle. Let him speak. I do not believe the answer to horrible ideas is generally to have government or universities decide Americans are incapable of hearing them. Free speech protects people saying things I despise as surely as it protects people saying things I admire. The constitutional question and the moral question, however, are not remotely the same question.

Hasan Piker has the right to speak. Abdul El-Sayed has the right to campaign with him. Twitch has enormous latitude to provide him a platform. Pramila Jayapal has the right to defend his opportunity to appear at a university. And the rest of us have every right to ask what these decisions tell us about the political movement in which he is becoming influential.

Congress itself has already recognized the seriousness of the issue. In April, Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer and Republican Congressman Mike Lawler introduced a bipartisan resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric by prominent online personalities, specifically including Piker and Candace Owens, and calling on public figures and social-media platforms to reject the normalization of antisemitism regardless of which ideological direction it comes from. That bipartisan point is essential. Antisemitism is not acceptable when it comes from the nationalist right, and it does not magically become acceptable when repackaged as revolutionary politics on the socialist left.

This is where I would also separate the argument completely from Abdul El-Sayed’s religion. He is Muslim. So what? That cannot be the criticism. America has millions of Muslim citizens who love the country, raise their families here, build businesses, serve in uniform and want precisely what everyone else wants: safety, prosperity, dignity and opportunity.

If we oppose antisemitism because group hatred is stupid and immoral, we cannot answer it with anti-Muslim bigotry and pretend we have accomplished something intellectually superior. That is not our way. That is not the American way. 

The “enemy inside the gates” is not Islam. It is not a race or a religion. It is an ideology that has become so morally distorted that it can explain away almost anything when the victim belongs to the wrong group. It is the idea that America itself is fundamentally wicked, that terrorism can become liberation when committed by the approved people, that capitalism is exploitation regardless of the prosperity it has produced, and that history can be reduced to an endless courtroom in which people are assigned inherited guilt based upon identity.

This is precisely why Piker’s fascination with revolutionary communism matters as well. Torres noted Piker’s presentation of himself in the imagery of Vladimir Lenin. Piker has more recently described the collapse of the Soviet Union as one of the great catastrophes of the 20th century. The Soviet experiment was not theoretical. Lenin built the architecture of one-party political terror that Stalin expanded on a colossal scale. Mao followed with his own catastrophic communist experiment in China. Whatever precise death total one assigns to each regime — historians dispute the numbers — the human record of communist totalitarianism is measured in millions upon millions of dead.

That history is worth remembering because political extremism always begins by convincing itself that its cause is morally superior enough to suspend ordinary rules. Once that happens, people stop being individuals. They become classes, races, colonizers, capitalists, Zionists, fascists, oppressors or enemies. Once humanity has been replaced by categories, cruelty becomes remarkably easy to rationalize.

That is what makes the post-October 7 explosion of antisemitism so revealing. We should have seen universal horror at the slaughter of civilians followed by an argument over what Israel should do in response. Instead, in too many places, we watched people move almost immediately to explaining why the victims were somehow implicated in their own murders. Jewish students found themselves confronted on American campuses. Ancient antisemitic language resurfaced inside a supposedly modern political movement. Terrorists were romanticized as resistance fighters while the democratic country they attacked was discussed as though its very existence constituted aggression.

There is nothing enlightened about any of this. It is ancient tribalism decorated in twenty-first-century vocabulary.

The Democratic Party therefore has a decision to make, and Democrats like Ritchie Torres understand the stakes better than many Republicans do because they are fighting the battle inside their own coalition. The issue is not whether every progressive agrees with Hasan Piker. Obviously they do not. The issue is whether Piker’s politics are moving from the fringe into an increasingly accepted part of the party’s activist and electoral infrastructure.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory makes that question unavoidable. Piker helped him. Piker celebrated the victory. Piker views it as evidence that his political movement has momentum. National Democratic leaders now need El-Sayed to win. That does not make El-Sayed responsible for every sentence Piker has ever uttered, but it does make it entirely reasonable to ask El-Sayed what his standards are and where his boundaries lie.

The same should apply to every politician in both parties. If a Republican candidate sought the electoral help of a popular streamer who had used comparable language about Black Americans, Muslims or Jews, praised foreign militants who injured American troops and said the United States deserved a terrorist massacre, Democrats would not accept the explanation that questioning the association constituted “gotcha politics.” They would demand an answer. They would be right.

Consistency is the cure for political hypocrisy.

I began with the stupidity of antisemitism because the entire subject eventually returns there. A Jew is not Benjamin Netanyahu. An American Muslim is not Hamas. A Palestinian child is not a terrorist. An Israeli child is not responsible for the policies of the Israeli government. An American is not personally responsible for every decision made in Washington. Human beings have individual moral agency, and the moment we begin assigning collective guilt to millions of people because of their ethnicity or religion, civilization starts moving backward very quickly.

October 7 happened. The rape, murder and kidnapping were real. Israel responded, and that response can and should be debated like the actions of every nation at war. Palestinians are human beings whose innocent lives matter equally, and no serious moral argument requires denying that reality. But neither Palestinian suffering nor opposition to Israeli policy justifies antisemitism, excuses Hamas or transforms the murder of Jews into some morally understandable act of political resistance.

That should be a very easy line to draw. Ritchie Torres has drawn it.

The disturbing question is why so many others still cannot.