On Demonic Antisemitism

This is a spiritual battle we cannot escape:

Just 87 years ago Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass took place. History seems to be repeating itself and rampant antisemitism is clearly on the increase. Thankfully so many others are concerned about this as well. Several helpful articles that just appeared on this issue are worth drawing your attention to. Let me start with something I recently wrote on this, and then share from the other two.

The zombie apocalypse is now upon us, and it is mainly so-called conservatives and Christians who are running amok here. And of course at the heart of almost all of this is an ugly, irrational and downright demonic antisemitism. I have never seen it this bad before. Sure, Jew-haters have always been with us – it is the world’s oldest and longest running form of hatred and prejudice. And ever since 1948, Israelphobia has been going full tilt. But especially since October 7, this has all ramped up to insane levels.

 

So many people that I used to know and respect as level-headed conservatives and Christians can no longer be called either. Too many have totally lost the plot and are now spewing the most malicious and diabolical hatred and contempt – with Jews being the main target. How this could happen only has one real explanation.

 

The truth is, ugly and entrenched antisemitism is not merely intellectual or ideological, but ultimately spiritual. It poisons the mind and the heart, and it gives Satan a wide-open point of entry into those who embrace and coddle it. It really is a poison that destroys the soul. Asking legit questions about anything, including Israel, is of course one thing, but a continual hatred of all things Jewish and Israeli is quite another. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/11/08/yes-conspiracy-theorists-are-still-among-us/

A few days later I spotted a terrific piece by Dr Tim Orr, who has a background in Islamic studies and is an Evangelical minister. He starts his piece as follows:

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest and most persistent hatred. No other form of prejudice has crossed as many civilizations, reshaped itself across so many centuries, or survived so many moral revolutions. What began as a religious accusation later became racial ideology, then political doctrine, and today disguises itself in the language of human rights. Each era reinvents the justification, yet the hostility remains. Historians can trace its evolution, and sociologists can map its patterns, but the deeper question—why this hatred endures with such supernatural resilience—cannot be answered by material analysis alone. Antisemitism is not just a social disease; it is a spiritual rebellion. To face it truthfully, one must look beyond psychology and politics to the moral and metaphysical drama that has shaped it since antiquity.

He goes on to say this:

The persistence of antisemitism cannot be understood apart from modern humanity’s loss of a moral vocabulary. Cultural historian Andrew Delbanco observed that modern societies have lost the language to speak meaningfully about evil. We still witness cruelty and destruction, but we explain them away as social dysfunction or psychological damage. Evil, once seen as rebellion against divine order, is now treated as pathology, misunderstanding, or accident. This shift has stripped moral clarity from public life. Without the framework of transcendence, the concept of sin evaporates, and all behavior becomes morally negotiable.

 

That loss has profound consequences. When evil cannot be named, it cannot be resisted. Antisemitism thrives in precisely such moral confusion because it disguises itself as virtue. Modern people who reject the idea of objective moral truth often find themselves vulnerable to moral inversions—forms of hatred cloaked in the language of compassion or justice. When societies lose their belief in good and evil as real, metaphysical categories, they also lose the ability to recognize the oldest manifestation of evil in their midst. The hatred of Jews, therefore, survives because it finds refuge in a culture that no longer believes evil exists.

Orr reminds us how the internet is compounding the problem:

The internet, once hailed as a tool of enlightenment, has become an amplifier for moral confusion. Online platforms reward outrage, cultivate suspicion, and spread dehumanizing narratives at unprecedented speed. Antisemitic ideas thrive in these spaces, often cloaked in humor, irony, or pseudo-intellectual posturing. The virtual world functions as a spiritual arena where old hatreds mutate and multiply. In this sense, the internet has become a theater for the same moral drama that has defined history—the rebellion of evil against the sacred.

He closes this way:

Dershowitz and Shapiro both observe that antisemitism reveals more about those who hate than those who are hated. Societies invoke it when they seek a scapegoat for their own moral failure. Scapegoats may change, but the need for them persists wherever guilt is denied. Yet despite this recurring hatred, Jewish survival testifies that evil never has the last word. Every empire that sought to annihilate the Jews—Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Nazi Germany—has vanished. The Jewish people remain. Their survival is not merely historical resilience but theological witness: proof that divine purpose endures beyond human malice.

 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks deepens this understanding by showing that antisemitism always expands beyond the Jews who first suffer from it. The hatred that begins with the covenant people eventually consumes every society that nurtures it, because hatred of Jews is ultimately hatred of the moral order itself. For that reason, combating antisemitism requires more than awareness or policy; it demands moral renewal. It requires recovering what Delbanco called the moral imagination—the ability to see evil not as abstraction but as spiritual reality intertwined with history.

 

To rebuild that imagination, courage and faith must return to public life. Courage allows truth to be spoken; faith restores the conviction that history has meaning. When societies rediscover transcendence, they can finally see antisemitism for what it is: not merely hostility toward a people, but rebellion against the God who speaks through their endurance. The oldest hatred persists, yet it is continually met by the oldest promise—that truth, goodness, and holiness remain real. The Jewish story stands as proof that moral order is not a human invention but a divine covenant woven into the very fabric of history. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-antisemitism-defies-natural-explanation/  

The second important piece is “What I Saw and Heard In Washington: Groyperism’s Spread Among Generation Z Conservative Apparatchiks Is Real” by Rod Dreher. This lengthy piece, like Orr’s should be read in full. But I can share some highlights from it here.

Early on he writes: “I was able to have a few minutes with the vice president before the PM and his team arrived. I shared with him my views about the threat that Nick Fuentes and Groyperism pose to the country, to the GOP, and to him personally. He listened to what I had to say. And that is all I can say about it, out of respect for his privacy.”

He continues:

If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

 

Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”

Let me note that I too have found that too many traditional Catholics have a deep hatred of Israel and the Jews. Dreher then goes on to say:

What about the Jews? This, to me, remains the most puzzling and sinister thing. Douglas Murray gave a talk over the weekend at a Prager U event, in which he reflected on the fact that lots of young conservatives notice that liberal secular Jews are disproportionately involved in organizations pushing mass migration, and draw anti-Semitic conclusions. Murray pointed out accurately that in Europe, by far the most prominent and influential advocates for open borders are the current pope and the previous one — yet few people blame Catholics for the problem. Why, then, do they all blame Jews?

And this:

About Israel, as you know I support Israel, but I also agree that criticism of the Israeli government does not logically imply anti-Semitism. Still, it’s rare, in my experience, to talk at length with people of the Left or the Right who have strong criticism of the Israeli government, who don’t elide it pretty easily into noxious views of Jews as Jews. That has been my experience, anyway. One thing that chaps my backside is the double standard lots of Israel critics have for the Jewish state, versus other countries. Any reasonable country in the world who had suffered what Israel did on 10/7, and who faced a religiously fanatical enemy next door whose founding document (the Hamas Charter) explicitly sacralizes the elimination of the Jewish state, would have done what the Israelis did. For us, it’s theoretical; for them, it’s existential.

He closes his piece by listing some key points – here are his first 7:

The main points I want to leave you with, based on what I saw and heard in Washington, are these:

-The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.

-Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil. If postliberal conservatism requires making peace with antisemitism and race hatred, count me out.

-It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down. It really does.

-At the same time, the gatekeepers of the Right aren’t going to be able to make it go away, because they have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.

-This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. And, as I keep saying, it emerged in a culture that, per Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis, is primed to believe totalitarian things.

-The Left got there first. This is not a case of “whatabout”; for almost two decades, left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies that openly intended to discriminate against whites, males, and anybody who dissented. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.

-Conservatives like me had hoped that Trump’s anti-woke pushback would simply restore the meritocratic status quo. It turns out that the Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.

His 13^th and final point is this:

-The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it. Nor should we, for the sake of party unity. In The House Of Government, Yuri Slezkine said that the willingness of parents to indulge their radical children played a significant role in the eventual triumph of Bolshevism. Some of these parents comforted themselves with the thought that their adult kids would grow out of their revolutionary fervor. Others may have hated what their kids believed, but didn’t want to risk alienating them, so they stayed quiet, and passively supported them, hoping for the best. VP Vance said publicly last week that this conservative “infighting” is a pointless distraction. I told him personally, and respectfully, in a meeting last Friday that I disagree, and why. And I told him why I think all this is a direct threat to his political future. https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington  

I encourage you to have a careful read of both pieces. These two men offer much-needed moral and mental clarity in our very disturbing times.

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