In San Jose, two Israeli-Americans were beaten outside a restaurant for speaking Hebrew while they waited for a table. One was knocked unconscious. A witness heard an attacker yell, “Don’t mess with Iran.” Two days earlier, in the Philippines, a Spanish tourist walked up to an Israeli reservist he’d never met, screamed “baby killer,” and attacked him. That same week, Ireland took delivery of a brand-new $61 million government jet — with the Israeli-made fog-landing system specifically stripped out first, on policy grounds, not safety ones.
Three continents, one thread. Pull on it, and it runs straight through the newsroom and into the United Nations.
Start with the newsroom. In May, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a 3,750-word piece accusing Israel of training dogs to sexually abuse Palestinian prisoners. No name, no date, no photograph — and the paper’s own independent corroborating source, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said publicly that his words had been twisted. A canine-behavior expert called the claim biologically implausible. The Times never corrected it. This is the same paper that put a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket on Israel’s account in 2023, and that ran a front-page “starving child” photo in 2025 whose subject, it later emerged, had pre-existing medical conditions the story never mentioned. The photographer won a Pulitzer for it anyway.
Even Hillary Clinton has gotten in on it, telling David Remnick on stage in June that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent years “obsessed” with striking Iran and “played games” with Washington to get there — the same playbook, she said, he later ran on President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, a Washington Post story on Netanyahu blocking an old Iron Dome transfer to Ukraine was factually accurate and included Israel’s own rationale — yet within days it had curdled online into “Jews are killing Ukrainians,” and nobody at the paper seemed especially bothered by the shape their accurate story had taken.
Governments follow the same script. In Italy, opposition leaders — including former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Democratic Party chief Elly Schlein — introduced a bill banning imports from West Bank settlements the same month two hospital workers filmed themselves throwing out Israeli-made medicine on the job; only a formal protest from Italy’s Jewish Medical Association produced an apology. Ireland’s jet is the same instinct with a bigger price tag. Media sets the climate; parliaments turn it into law — and somewhere down the line, someone translates the law into a fist. Which is what happened in San Jose and in the Philippines: ordinary people assaulting strangers over the language they spoke or the passport they carried, within 48 hours of each other on two different continents. Once is a coincidence. Twice, 48 hours apart on opposite sides of the planet, is a pattern.
To understand where that signature comes from, look at the institution that made all of this respectable in the first place: the U.N.
The U.N. was founded on the promise of “never again.” One of its own current officials got there the hard way. In 2015, years before she became the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese posted “Go Leila go!” — a cheer for Leila Khaled, the woman who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969 trying to kidnap Yitzhak Rabin, and who took part in a second hijacking attempt in 1970 before her arrest. The interesting question was never why she wrote it. It’s why the U.N., seven years later, handed the job of monitoring Israel to exactly this person.
That’s not new behavior for the institution. Its second Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, was a former Wehrmacht intelligence officer whose unit operated in the Balkans during the deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews to Auschwitz — a fact he spent decades concealing. When Black September murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Waldheim offered condolences but never named the perpetrators. The following year, the same group’s gunmen opened fire and threw grenades at El Al passengers in the Athens airport transit lounge, killing five and wounding 55. The U.N.’s silence held. A year after that, the U.N. formally recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization — whose charter called explicitly for Israel’s destruction — and gave Yasser Arafat a standing ovation as he addressed the General Assembly with a visible pistol holster on his hip. The following year, the same body passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism, 72 votes to 35.
It never really stopped. In 1980, the U.N.’s own women’s conference in Copenhagen was led, on the Palestinian side, by the plane hijacker Leila Khaled; an American feminist in attendance later wrote in Ms. magazine that she heard, verbatim, that the only good Jew was a dead one, and that ridding the world of Zionism meant killing every Jew in it. In 2001, at the U.N.’s Durban conference against racism, copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were sold openly alongside flyers of Hitler captioned “What if I had won?” In 2009, the sequel conference in Geneva gave the podium to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the only head of state who bothered to show up, who called Israel “the most racist” government on Earth — prompting 23 countries to walk out mid-speech while the delegates who stayed behind applauded.
And on Oct. 27, 2023 — three weeks after Hamas murdered roughly 1,200 people — Canada asked the General Assembly to simply condemn the massacre and demand the hostages’ release. The amendment failed. By then, it had already emerged that the U.N.’s own refugee agency, UNRWA, employed staff tied to the attack; the U.N.’s own internal investigators confirmed possible involvement for nine of the employees they examined, and a U.S. federal watchdog has since gone further, confirming 21 such cases with more than 100 still under investigation.
MAMDANI’S TOUGH TALK EXPOSED AS DECEPTIVE VIRTUE SIGNALING
None of this requires a conspiracy to explain. It requires only noticing that a newsroom that won’t correct a lie, a government chasing ideological purity, a young man throwing a punch on a California sidewalk, and an organization that gave a terrorist a standing ovation are not unrelated events. Taken separately, each one is defensible as an isolated lapse. Taken together, they are a system — and one that adversaries from Tehran to Moscow have learned to read as an open invitation, since a West distracted by fighting itself over Israel is a West not watching them.
There’s an old saying: it starts with the Jews, but it never ends only with the Jews. It never has. History is littered with people who thought this particular hatred would stay contained.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the U.S. in 2012.