(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.

Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.

Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.

During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.

One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”

Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”

In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.

Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.

In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.

Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.

The post Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’ appeared first on The Forward.

The Oct. 7 attack was a massacre. But Israeli authorities would prefer you not call it that.

The Prime Minister’s Office demanded that a bill establishing a national memorial for the incursion remove the term “massacre” from its title, with Minister Mickey Zohar explaining that since Israel is “strong,” no one can “massacre the people of Israel.”

In other words: To accurately describe what happened when Hamas struck Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 —killing almost 1,200 and kidnapping 251 hostages — is unpatriotic, signals weakness, and is, somehow, leftist.

This is not really a matter of semantics. It’s an attempt to control language in order to distort reality. And it’s tied to the Netanyahu government’s vast project of evading accountability for the many military and political failures that contributed to the horrors of Oct. 7.

Their method is time-tested. Early versions of it appear in classical sources, in which rulers often rename actions to soften their meaning.

King Saul masks disobedience as a religious act. King David cloaks the fact that he planned the death of his romantic rival Uriah in the language of war.

Ancient Greeks observed that political conflicts alter not only reality but also the meaning of words. Thucydides described how during civil strife, recklessness was called courage, moderation was branded as weakness, and caution was treated as betrayal, illuminating how language could be inverted to serve passion and polarization.

In ancient Rome, the phenomenon assumed a more formal character. The emperor Aurelian gave himself the title restitutor orbis, meaning “restorer of the world”; he framed a series of brutal conflicts he embarked on to reunite the Roman empire as an act of correction, rather than conquest. It was a formulation that wrapped violence in a mantle of legitimacy and proper governance.

As political systems evolved, so did linguistic sophistication. During the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror was overseen by a body called the Committee of Public Safety. The Nazi regime called its deportations of Jews to concentration camps “resettlement” and described some executions as “special treatment.” Stalin did not cause famine; there were “grain procurement difficulties.” Mao Zedong did not preside over catastrophe; he launched a “Great Leap Forward.”

George Orwell identified this mechanism with unmatched clarity in his novel 1984. His fictional government’s “Ministry of Truth” serves the function of degrading language until truth becomes inexpressible, with the slogan “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

The contradictions are deliberate. Their purpose is to train citizens to accept inversion and surrender their independent grasp of reality.

Orwell’s deeper insight was that the corruption of language precedes the corruption of politics. When words lose precision, accountability dissolves. Reality becomes malleable, and loyal followers will believe whatever they are told. If aggression is always “defense,” repression always “order,” and censorship always “responsibility,” there is little limit to what rulers can do.

The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it even more sharply — beautifully, even — in 1973’s Breakfast of Champions: “In nonsense is strength.”

This phenomenon is not confined to totalitarian regimes. Democracies, too, are tempted to soften language when confronting failure. Even — and perhaps especially — in Israel.

Thus, the killing of civilians becomes “harm to uninvolved civilians,” phrasing that distances attention from human reality. Torture becomes “moderate physical pressure.” Extrajudicial killings become “targeted prevention.”

Set aside the question of whether these measures are ever justified: It’s essential to note that the language itself undergoes distortion for political ends.

The Netanyahu government has a specific goal behind this approach. Avoiding the word “massacre” in describing Oct. 7 fits into its broader strategy of evading responsibility for the disaster itself.

Netanyahu has refused to accept any blame since the first hours after the attack, including by arguing that no investigation into his actions could take place during wartime, while prolonging the war as much as possible. At the same time, his allies attacked the Supreme Court to justify avoiding a state commission of inquiry with real authority.

To refuse to call Oct. 7 a massacre is to suggest it was somehow less brutal or devastating than it was. So let us dispel the nonsense.

A massacre involves the deliberate killing of a large number of defenseless people. It does not imply permanent strategic defeat. It does not preclude a military response afterward. It does not suggest inherent weakness. It describes a specific act: the intentional slaughter of civilians under circumstances in which they cannot defend themselves.

On Oct. 7, 2023, armed Hamas militants invaded Israel and committed a massacre, almost unopposed by Israeli security forces, in a crushing national collapse. Families were shot in their homes. People were hunted down, executed, or burned. Hostages were taken. Most of the victims were civilians. It was hours before the public heard anything from the shell-shocked Netanyahu.

Call it what it was. Truth combined with moral clarity, over time, are a nation’s deepest source of strength. Resistance to accurate language serves to dull the recognition that something profoundly shocking occurred — something that demands deep reckoning and change, not a continuation of the morally bereft and misleading status quo.

The post The Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really. appeared first on The Forward.

The ADL published and then retracted a claim that the alleged mass shooter at a school in Canada maintained a social media account with antisemitic posts, a day after it posted the erroneous information on its website.

The organization wrote Thursday at the bottom of an updated page about alleged Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar that it had incorrectly concluded that an X account containing the posts belonged to the alleged shooter. Nine people were killed in the shooting, including Van Rootselaar.

“A preliminary investigation uncovered an X account appearing to belong to the shooter. Upon further investigation, that X account has been found not credible. References to it have been removed,” the correction read.

Authorities in British Columbia said they could not speculate on the motive of the shooter.

The ADL, the most prominent U.S. antisemitism research and advocacy organization, had posted the claim Wednesday on its website. The Forward has reached out to the ADL for comment.

The error, from the ADL’s Center On Extremism, comes amid broader changes in the ADL’s approach.

The ADL’s original post said that on Sunday — two days before the attack — an X account connected to Van Rootselaar posted, “I need to hate jews because the zionists want me to hate jews. This benefits them, somehow.”

“The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s X profile photo also featured an image of the Christchurch shooter superimposed over a Sonnenrad, a neo-Nazi symbol, and a transgender pride flag,” the ADL wrote in the original post, referencing an antisemitic mass murder in New Zealand.

It did not link to the profile or include images of it, leaving the claim difficult to verify.

The Center On Extremism is a flagship program that has been overhauled in recent years as the organization has shifted toward a greater focus on fighting antisemitism. In September, it deleted its Glossary of Extremism, which had contained over 1,000 pages of background information on hate groups and ideologies. It said at the time that the entries were outdated.

The post ADL retracts Tumbler Ridge shooting antisemitism claim appeared first on The Forward.