In 67 BCE, with the death of Queen Salome Alexandra, the golden age of the Hasmonean dynasty collapsed into a bloody civil war. The prolonged struggle exacted a heavy toll, but the true beneficiaries were Judea’s enemies — especially the Romans, who exploited the chaos to bring the kingdom under imperial control. Internal strife led to the loss of Jewish sovereignty, and Jewish independence would not be restored until the 20th century.

More than 2,000 years have passed, yet the lesson remains painfully relevant. The events of October 7, 2023, shocked the people of Israel, who had been consumed by intense internal divisions. The debate over judicial reform had polarized Israeli society to an unprecedented degree. Yet, within hours of Hamas’ brutal attack, those differences faded — Israel stood united as one against a ruthless enemy.

On October 8, 2023, we witnessed a different Israel: unified, resilient, and invincible. Political squabbles suddenly became secondary to the urgent need to defend the nation. Volunteers flooded combat zones, donations poured in, and the entire country rallied behind soldiers, hostages, the wounded, and the displaced.

Now, as time passes, we find ourselves slipping back into historical patterns reminiscent of the Hasmonean civil war. Just weeks after a fragile ceasefire with Hamas, public discourse has once again turned to bitter disputes over reforms, legislation, and political interests. Power struggles between the coalition and opposition have resumed, and the atmosphere feels increasingly fractured. Have we truly learned nothing?

Social media is rife with venomous rhetoric, with each faction accusing the other of betraying national values and causing the chaos that led to October 7. Once again, we are forgetting a painful historical truth: our enemies are not waiting for us to resolve our differences — they are simply waiting for us to be weak enough to strike again. They do not care who supported judicial reform and who opposed it. They see us as one people — and sometimes, we need to remind ourselves of that, too.

Yet, those most responsible for acknowledging this reality — our leaders — continue to act as if nothing has changed. Instead of fostering unity, members of the Knesset, from both the coalition and opposition, are fueling the flames. They are not working to mend divisions but to deepen them, driven by a desperate chase for likes and shares on social media.

Instead of leading toward reconciliation, they pit citizens against each other, adding fuel to an already raging fire, reducing national unity to a cheap political tool.

It is time for new leadership — leadership that prioritizes the welfare of the people above all else. Leadership that is open to fresh ideas and unafraid to make bold decisions. Leadership that unites rather than divides, that seeks the greater good rather than petty victories.

True unity does not mean uniformity — it means embracing diverse perspectives and finding common ground. We need leaders who will listen to all sectors of society, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or background, and create a true national home. Leaders who serve the people rather than themselves, from both coalition and opposition, and who act with a sense of duty and responsibility. Leaders who will learn from history — both its triumphs and its failures — and guide us toward a future of hope, prosperity, and security. A future we deserve.

Itamar Tzur is the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative and an Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern history. He holds a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Jewish History and a Master’s degree with honors in Middle Eastern studies. As a senior member of the “Forum Kedem for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy,” he leverages his academic expertise to deepen understanding of regional dynamics and historical contexts.

The post Israel’s National Unity Has Faded Since Oct. 7, and Its Survival Is at Risk first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

In April 2024, Guardian columnist Naomi Klein said that Zionism is a “project that commits genocide in” the name of the world’s Jews. We argued at the time that this op-ed was one of the most despicable pieces published at the outlet in the 15 years we’ve been monitoring their content.

Last week, they published an essay by Peter Beinart (adapted from his new book) that arguably has the potential to incite even more hatred against Jews than Klein’s screed.

Beinart, a Guardian columnist, is a former “Liberal Zionist” turned anti-Zionist, and now fancies himself one of the few Jewish voices brave enough to speak out about what he claims is the moral corruption at the core of Zionism — which he’s characterized as “supremacism” — and the Jewish community more broadly.

He also largely blamed the Oct. 7th massacre on Israel’s long “denial of Palestinian freedom,” and began describing the IDF’s early response to Hamas’ pogrom, including even the relocation of Palestinian civilians to keep them out of harm’s way, as “monstrous crime” and another potential “Nakba,” before even the ground invasion began.

He focuses his Guardian essay on the “dark side” of Purim, which he likens with Jewish support for the “slaughter in Gaza.”

What’s the “dark side” of Purim to Beinart?

Writing as if he’s the only Jew who’s ever read the Megillah — and then serving the role of a Jewish informer, “revealing” to non-Jews the sinister truth about this seemingly joyous Jewish festival — Beinart chides the Jewish community for “forgetting” that the book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s execution after his plan to annihilate the Jews was thwarted.

Since the genocidal edict couldn’t be annulled, Beinart recounts, Jews were allowed to defend themselves by striking, “slaying and destroying” their “enemies with the sword.”

The Jews, he adds, “killed 75,000 people” and then declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking.”

He then writes that “with the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry” — before warning, in a sentence that “Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.”  [emphasis added]

The Book of Esther, however, couldn’t be clearer that the Jews’ enemies prepared a genocide, and Jews fought back and killed their enemies, preventing the genocide.

Though this is indeed cause for celebration, antisemites through the ages have distorted and weaponized the text, claiming it shows that Jews are vengeful, bloodthirsty, and even genocidal.

Beinart’s agenda here in using rhetoric redolent of the ancient blood libel, about the “blood-soaked massacre” celebrated during Purim, is clear, as he begins pivoting to Israeli sins, and, eventually, to the Gaza war, moralizing that “today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

Why should we be “unsettled”?

Beinart answers that by chiding contemporary Jews for a “false innocence” when discussing Israel. He criticizes Israelis and Jews who (correctly!) point out that “the Palestinian refugee issue originated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.” In Beinart’s telling, the attack by five Arab armies of the nascent Jewish State was justifiable — a war launched to protect the Palestinians from the Jews.

Turing to Gaza, he not only blames “establishment Jewish officials” for promoting what he suggests is a lie — or, at least, a huge exaggeration — that Hamas uses Palestinians civilians as human shields, which vastly increases the number of non-combatants killed, but seems to defend the terror group’s use of human shields, writing that this tactic is “typical of insurgent groups.”

Mocking those who would hold the terror group itself responsible for hiding fighters and weapons in homes, mosques, and hospitals, and using a tunnel system below civilian infrastructure, Beinart wonders what precisely Hamas should do, “put on brightly colored uniforms, walk into an open field, and take on a vastly more powerful conventional army?! ”

The answer is painfully obvious to all but the most extreme anti-Zionist ideologues: they shouldn’t have attacked Israel and slaughtered Jews in the first place.

To most Jews, Beinart continues in his complaint, the “human shield” argument is designed “to prove that Israel is always innocent“ — and that the state is never the author of Palestinian suffering. In this, we see the stunning moral obtuseness that informs his discourse on Judaism and Israel.

For anti-Zionist Jews like Beinart, it is Palestinians who are never assigned agency, but, instead, are infantilized, with their deep-seated antisemitic pathos framed as a legitimate grievance.

Whether we’re discussing the Palestinian leadership’s alliance with Hitler, their opposition to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, decades of terrorism, including the Second Intifada, which was launched during the peak of the peace process, or the rejection of several Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood, bad Palestinian decisions are inevitably framed in a way exculpating Palestinians, while imputing an Israeli root cause.

At his core, Beinart refuses to hold Palestinians morally culpable for participating in, supporting, or providing succor to, the death cult whose bloody pogromists murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated Jews with glee — and whose leaders knew full well that the response to their unprovoked attack would bring untold suffering to civilians.

Moreover, no lessons were learned by the pro-Palestinian movement on that dark Shabbat day. Instead of anything resembling self-reflection, most, as Beinart’s reaction in the days and months following the massacre showed, actually doubled down on their beliefs, intensifying their denunciations of Israel.

“Western activists for Palestinians,” Shany Mor wrote, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”. Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”

Finally, Peter Beinart is not a self-hating Jew.

Rather, he fancies himself a better Jew — in fact, one of the very few genuinely “good Jews.” In his book, Trials of the Diaspora, Anthony Julius calls Jews like Beinart “scourges” — a term which relates to their self-anointed role as prophets, whipping the wayward Jewish people into line. By indicting most Jews, and the Jewish State, he puts himself on the “right” side of the moral divide, proclaiming his own superiority to the ruck of his sinful fellow Jews.

What Beinart now peddles, Haviv Rettig Gur observed, “is an ideologically updated version of the same claim of deep-seated and defining criminality in the Jews” as Theobald of Cambridge, a Jewish convert to Christianity who leveled the first known accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children. Beinart, a convert to anti-Zionism, confirms “to our tormentors that [Jews’] criminality is the distillation and apotheosis of the great evils of our age”.

The fact The Guardian employed Peter Beinart’s services as a Jewish informer, a modern-day Theobold, should surprise nobody.

Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a different version of this article appeared.

The post Peter Beinart Thinks He Is a ‘Good Jew’ — The Truth Is Anything But first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

If the unstoppable rise of social media defined the 2000s and 2010s, then the 2020s belong to the podcast. Audio talk formats have existed since the advent of radio, but for years, they struggled to hold younger audiences’ attention, eclipsed by television, streaming platforms, and social media.

But talking is back. And this time, the listeners aren’t just middle-aged commuters or retirees pottering around the garden. Today, young people are tuning in en masse, eager to hear podcast hosts discuss everything from politics to pop culture and self-improvement.

Social media’s meteoric rise inevitably led to intense scrutiny. In its early days — a digital Wild West — platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) hosted everything from hardcore pornography to snuff videos. But as these companies grew, so did their moderation efforts. Today, giants like Meta and TikTok employ large teams to monitor and remove illegal or inciteful content. Case in point: HonestReporting’s successful campaign to get pro-Hamas influencer Jackson Hinkle de-platformed from Meta.

Yet, despite these efforts, antisemitic hate speech remains rampant on social media, particularly since Meta followed X’s lead under Elon Musk in loosening content moderation policies. The result? A documented surge in violent rhetoric and conspiracy theories targeting Jews.

Still, social media platforms at least pretend to enforce some level of oversight. In January, Meta once again mimicked X by introducing its own Community Notes feature, allowing approved users to add context to misleading posts. It’s far from perfect, but at least it’s something.

Podcasting, on the other hand, operates with virtually no scrutiny. Part of this is due to its relatively recent rise in popularity. But there’s also a lingering — and patently inaccurate — perception that podcasts, like traditional broadcast media, adhere to some level of fact-checking and editorial standards.

Podcast platforms today are closer to a free-for-all, where anything goes so long as it attracts enough listeners to be profitable. And young people are listening — a lot. According to Pew Research, nearly half (48%) of Americans aged 18 to 29 tune in to podcasts multiple times a week. More importantly, they don’t just passively consume content — they actively engage with it.

Listeners under 50 are far more likely to follow podcast hosts on social media, adopt new habits based on what they hear, and participate in online discussions about their favorite shows. Around 40% of listeners aged 18 to 49 say they’ve made lifestyle changes because of something they heard on a podcast.

For younger audiences, podcasts aren’t just background noise. They shape conversations, influence personal choices, and, as growing evidence indicates, are increasingly pulling listeners toward more extreme ideologies.

Spotify’s Cash Cow: Joe Rogan

With over 14 million listeners and the title of Spotify’s top podcaster in 2024, Joe Rogan is the undisputed king of the podcasting world. His guest list includes everyone from Donald Trump to Mark Zuckerberg, Bernie Sanders, and Edward Snowden — proof of both his influence and his ability to play host to just about anyone.

Controversy has always been Rogan’s currency. His media empire thrives on the outrage his show generates, and at this point, what once shocked no longer has the same impact. That may, at least in part, explain his latest choice of guest: Ian Carroll, a self-proclaimed journalist who has spent years trafficking in virulent antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Carroll checks all the usual modern-day antisemite boxes: blaming 9/11 on Israel, ranting about a “Zionist mafia” controlling the US, and recycling every tired trope about Jewish financial and political influence. Over the course of his nearly three-hour appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he delivered an unfiltered torrent of conspiracy theories, offering little more than a jumble of well-worn antisemitic rhetoric.

Israel, he claimed, was founded by “organized crime figures in America” with ties to “the Jewish mob” and “the Rothschild banking family.” Jeffrey Epstein, he added in a particularly incoherent segment, “was clearly a Jewish organization working on behalf of Israel and other groups.”

And Rogan? He nodded along, offering words of encouragement, even musing at one point, “What’s interesting is you can talk about this now, post-Oct. 7, post-Gaza.”

It was a telling remark. The host who built his brand on “just asking questions” had stopped questioning entirely — and instead, provided a platform for undisguised Nazi propaganda.

Selling Holocaust Denial: Tucker Carlson & Candace Owens

Not only did Carlson give Cooper an unchallenged platform to spread these lies to an audience of millions, but he also lavished him with praise, calling him “the most important popular historian in the United States.”

Carlson’s interview with Cooper appeared to be an attempt to disguise his guest’s modern-day Nazi views with a veneer of intellectual credibility. It was only a slightly more sophisticated repackaging of antisemitism than that offered by Candace Owens — one of the most influential podcasters in the world, with nearly 4 million subscribers — who has used her platform to defend Adolf Hitler, accuse Israel of enforcing apartheid against Muslims, and push the ever-reliable conspiracy that Hollywood is secretly controlled by Jewish elites.

Owens, perhaps, lacks the intellectual prowess to attempt subtlety. When Kanye West praised Hitler, Owens brushed it off as merely his opinion while mocking Jews who criticized him as overly “emotional” and insisting they “can’t take a joke.” When confronted, her response followed the predictable script of the intellectually dishonest — first doubling down, then claiming victimhood, and, when that failed, falling back on the old “I was just asking questions” line.

With figures like Carlson and Owens normalizing and laundering these ideas, Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracies are no longer confined to the fringes — they’re being streamed to millions, dressed up as “alternative perspectives” in the name of free speech.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by HonestReporting (@honestreporting)

Mainstreaming the “Manosphere”: Myron Gaines

The online ecosystem known as the manosphere was once the niche domain of pick-up artists, incels, and self-styled “alpha males.” But thanks to figures like Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines, it has metastasized into a mainstream movement — one built on a foundation of misogyny, racism, and antisemitism.

Gaines, a former Homeland Security agent turned dating guru (real name: Amrou Fudl), co-hosts the Fresh & Fit podcast, a show that masquerades as a men’s self-improvement program but in reality serves as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and open admiration for fascism.

Fresh & Fit has repeatedly hosted Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and far-right propagandists, including Nick Fuentes — who has used his multiple appearances to justify Nazi book burnings and deny the Holocaust. Gaines himself has bragged, “We’re the biggest platform that’s talking about the JQ. No one else will do it” — a reference to the so-called “Jewish Question,” the same phrase the Nazis used to justify genocide.

Podcaster Myron Gaines with alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate.

In another episode, Gaines defended Hitler, declaring, “Though he did things that were morally incorrect, he definitely did a bunch of things correct for his country. That’s a fact.” One of the show’s longest-running gags — if you can call it that — is playing a cash register sound effect whenever discussing Jewish people.

Despite this, Fresh & Fit remains wildly popular, drawing millions of views on Rumble and other platforms.

A Wall of Silence From Podcast Platforms

At the heart of all this are the podcast streaming platforms themselves: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Rumble — giants that make a healthy profit off the hate spewed by their most popular stars.

YouTube, to its credit, has been marginally more proactive, demonetizing Gaines’s Fresh & Fit podcast and banning Nick Fuentes entirely. But these measures are ultimately futile. Without a unified approach across all major platforms, these creators can simply migrate elsewhere, continuing to rake in millions of views and sponsorship dollars.

And even outright bans mean little when controversial figures can just appear as guests on someone else’s show. Case in point: Candace Owens’ most popular YouTube video isn’t even her own — it’s an interview with alleged sex trafficker and influencer Andrew Tate. That single episode has racked up nearly 7 million views, more than twice as many as her channel’s entire subscriber base.

Podcasting’s near-total lack of oversight is no longer just a fringe problem — it’s a mainstream industry failure. Given the enormous reach of these platforms, the question isn’t whether they should be scrutinized, but why they haven’t been already.

And if the platforms won’t take responsibility, perhaps their advertisers should. Does Coca-Cola want its brand associated with Holocaust denial? Should Nike, Pepsi, and Amazon be comfortable sponsoring content that jokes about Jews being murdered? Are they certain their ads aren’t playing next to a discussion about how “Hitler was right”?

It’s easy to dismiss podcasting as mere shock talk. But talk influences action. And right now, podcast platforms — and the brands funding them — are profiting from hate. The only question is: how long can they pretend not to notice?

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post How Podcasts, Joe Rogan & Tucker Carlson Stream Holocaust Denial, the ‘Jewish Question’ & 9/11 Conspiracies to Millions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.