In the spring of 2025, I traveled to Michigan Technological University to speak to a Young Americans for Freedom chapter on freedom, responsibility, and entitlement. After the speech, the Q&A shifted to the subject of Oct. 7 and its aftermath, with several older members of the audience, at least one of whom was a member of the faculty, churning out jihadi talking points. Physics professor Miguel Levy informed me that Hamas members are “freedom fighters.”
But while this was perhaps the most despicable comment of the evening, the words that stuck with me were provided by someone else: an elderly lady who dismissed the threat posed by Iran and its proxies because, while they may chant “death to America,” they don’t mean it.
It’s just a slogan, you see, a vague expression of anti-American sentiment, for which American policy is often to blame.
Of course, in reality, this is the terrorist version of “fiery, but mostly peaceful.” When they chant “Death to America,” all they mean is “death to America.”
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who declared in 2023 that “when you chant ‘death to America,’ it is not just a slogan. It is a policy.” On another occasion, Khamenei informed an Iranian audience that “death to America” means “death to Trump, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo.”
Sounds clear, no?
Unfortunately, the absurd voluntary ignorance applied to words that mean exactly what they sound like isn’t limited to “death to America.” New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a theater-kid socialist whose radical insanity is fueling former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s return to New York politics, recently argued on the Bulwark podcast that “globalize the intifada” is a call for Palestinian human rights, even claiming that the word “intifada” was “used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic — because it’s a word that means struggle.”
Setting aside the intentional comparison of the Palestinian experience to the victims of Nazi Germany — a topic that I will be exploring in my 2026 book, Hitler’s Heirs — and the fact that Mamdani’s argument was so ridiculous the Holocaust Museum itself immediately rejected it, this is precisely the same linguistic abuse performed by those who claim that “death to America” doesn’t mean “death to America.”
The very same people who screamed that speech is violence are now telling you that violence is not violence. Death means death, and intifada means intifada, which in the context of the Palestinian “struggle” relates to the First and Second Intifadas, which were yearslong waves of bloodthirsty and genocidal Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians.
Megan McArdle, a columnist for the Washington Post, was slightly gracious in her response, writing, “If you have to explain that your slogan doesn’t mean what most people think it means, it is a bad slogan and you should pick a different one. See, also: Defund the Police.”
TRUMP UNDERSTANDS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRAN
But let’s not forget that the “defund the police” people quite literally wanted to defund the police!
So I’ll go one step further. The people using “death to America” or “intifada” don’t believe it means anything other than “death to America” or “intifada.” They want a global intifada, just like they want death to America, death to England, and death to Israel. Their denial of the reality of their words is just one tool in a tactical toolbelt used to manipulate useful idiots in the West who are so dedicated to their campaign of ignorance that they would stare a suicide bomber in the face and do nothing but ask if the ticking mass of C4 explosives, ball-bearings, and nails are the latest minority-owned industrial-urban chic release from Fifth Avenue.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.