The villagers of Chelm once faced a serious problem.

A wooden bridge at the edge of town had a loose plank in the middle. People kept stepping on it, falling through, and breaking their legs. The town elders gathered for an emergency meeting. Some said, “We should put up warning signs!” Others said, “We should add lights along the bridge!”

Then one leader stood up and said, “I have the answer! Let’s build a hospital at the bottom of the bridge!”

This, I fear, is where America stands today.

Just a few days ago, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire. The President, the First Lady, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher with an engineering degree, had written a manifesto targeting administration officials, and investigators later found anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts.

Regardless of where one stands politically, this news should shake our very core. A civilized society cannot become comfortable with such evil acts of violence. And yet, by morning, the conversation had already shifted: More security. Stricter gun laws. Better screening.

All of it sounded like building another hospital at the bottom of the bridge — because while some of these ideas are worthy and necessary, they do not answer the deeper question that should be at the forefront of our minds: How did we arrive at a moment when evil has become so banal that it no longer shocks us?

Many blame all sorts of reasons — from political extremism to mental illness, from social media to economic anxiety — and while each of these may contain parts of the truth, none addresses the root of the problem. Because the broken plank is not only political. It is a crisis of the nation’s soul.

Shortly after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the same Washington Hilton in Washington D.C., the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressed the nation with remarkable clarity. The Rebbe rejected the explanation that crime grows from deprivation and poverty, as some suggested. The Rebbe noted that Reagan’s attacker lacked nothing materially. The real issue, the Rebbe said, was that he lacked education. Not education of the mind alone, but education of the conscience.

A child must grow up knowing that there is “an Eye that sees and an Ear that hears,” that human life is sacred, that actions matter even when no one is watching, and that freedom is not permission to do whatever one wishes, but responsibility to do what is right.

Without that foundation, a society may produce people of dazzling intellectual brilliance, but with almost no goodness to guide it.

Alas, history has already shown us where that road leads. The Nazi era proved that reason alone can rationalize anything, even evil. Germany of the 20th century produced philosophers, scientists, poets, and composers. And yet, it also produced Auschwitz.

In Schindler’s List, there is a haunting scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in which a little girl, hiding near a piano, is shot by an SS guard. As her tiny body lies in blood, another guard sits down and begins to play the piano. One guard asks the other, “Is that Bach?” His friend replies, “No. Mozart.” And they continue to discuss the music as if nothing had happened. That was Nazi Germany: murder alongside Mozart.

Elie Wiesel once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe how he could still believe in God after Auschwitz. The Rebbe responded with a question of his own: “In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?”

Because without God and the absolute truth of His Bible, morality becomes negotiable. Without grounding ourselves in Divine commandments such as “Do not murder,” even cultured and educated people can descend into evil.

We must act responsibly in the face of real threats, increase security, and pass legislation where needed. But if we truly want to prevent the next attack, we must repair the bridge itself. And that repair begins with teaching our children not only how to think, but how to live. Not only how to succeed, but how to serve. Not only how to respect life, but how to recognize “the Lord your God” Who gives us life and Who commands us to protect it in ourselves and in others.

A few years ago, here in Arizona, I had the privilege of working with Governor Doug Ducey and others to help bring a statewide Moment of Silence to the beginning of the school day. Just one quiet minute in which students can pause and remember that life has purpose, that actions have meaning, and that there is something greater than themselves.

This responsibility belongs to all of us. Adults and children alike must know that kindness is not optional, that words matter, and that every human being — even those who are different from us — is created in the image of God. And the simple moral truths that built our civilization must once again guide the way we live: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Love your fellow as yourself.” “Do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is being shed.”

Let us repair the bridge. Let us return to God and His guidance, and strengthen the soul of our country. For when a nation strengthens its soul, it not only survives. It rises.

Rabbi Pinchas Allouche is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Beth Tefillah and the founding dean and spiritual leader of the Nishmat Adin High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he resides with his wife, Esther, and 10 children. 

Within hours of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), a comment on The Young Turks’ social media pages offered one theory of the case.

The shooting, the commenter explained, was the work of “the family that owns and brags it founded that country and stole our fed and our way of tying our currency to its value in gold.”

Another, on the same channel, called it “another convincing Mossad-CIA joint charade.”

A sitting president had nearly been shot at a press dinner in Washington. The shooter, a 31-year-old California tutor named Cole Tomas Allen, was already in custody. None of this had any plausible connection to Israel, Jews, or the Federal Reserve. The audience supplied that connection anyway.

At NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, my colleagues and I collected and annotated 2,000 YouTube comments from 10 major US news outlets in the first 24 hours after the attack — left, center, and right — and compared them to our earlier work on the Charlie Kirk killing in September 2025 and on the saturation of antisemitic conspiracy during last summer’s US-Israeli campaign against Iran.

What we found is a structural shift in how online publics process political violence in real time. It is not, on its surface, what a Jewish reader might expect. It is more troubling than that.

At first glance, what I am about to describe might look like a decline in antisemitism. It is not.

In the Kirk corpus, roughly three in 10 comments performed conventional blame attribution: it was the Left’s fault, the Right’s fault, the media’s fault, Kirk’s own rhetoric. At the WHCD, that figure collapses to one in 20. Conspiracy theories — false flag claims, staged-event narratives, claims that Trump himself or the security state orchestrated the shooting — jump from a marginal six percent to roughly one in four. Within a single news cycle, the question being answered shifted from *who is responsible?* to *did this even happen?*

And it shifted across the entire spectrum.

At CBS, the most-engaged comment in the entire corpus — 1,887 likes — read: “That’s a helluva way to get out of the dinner berating.” The second most-engaged, 1,875 likes: “And the band played on.” A Titanic metaphor, Trump as the doomed captain.

One-word assertions reached the engagement-leading tier without any humor cover at all: “STAGED” at CBS, 659 likes. “Faker than 3 dollar bill BS” at CNN, 1,233 likes.

The same logic ran in the opposite direction at Fox News, where the staging frame was inverted into “MAGA-HOAX” — left-leaning commenters arriving on the Fox thread accused MAGA itself of having staged the attack. Different villain, identical architecture: a manufactured event, a hidden orchestrator, a perpetrator framed as a patsy, security-camera footage read as evidence of staging.

The motives stacked on top of one another — mutually exclusive, but co-existing without friction. Trump staged it to escape being roasted at the dinner. Trump staged it to manufacture sympathy for his $400 million ballroom expansion. Trump staged it to distract from issues like the Iran war, or from his collapsing poll numbers. 

This is what a comment section now looks like in the hours after a political-violence event in the United States. Not partisan blame. Not grief. Not even shock. Instead, we see conspiracy as the default register of interpretation, stable across editorial positions.

What does this have to do with Jews?

Six weeks ago, during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the same architecture was running through the same comment sections — and the orchestrator slot was filled by Israel, by Mossad, by AIPAC, by “the family that founded that country,” by Trump-as-Israeli-asset. The mechanics were identical. What rotated was the villain.

This is what Jewish readers need to see clearly. The conspiratorial machinery that saturates American comment sections after political violence is not ideologically fixed. It is a template. It takes whatever villain the moment makes available — Israel during Iran coverage, Trump and the CIA at the WHCD, regardless of context, because that audience already carries the frame.

Antisemitism, in other words, has become structurally optional but instantly available. The infrastructure no longer needs a Jewish orchestrator to function. It still has a slot ready for one.

That is why a comparatively low antisemitism rates at most outlets this week is not a reprieve. It is a measurement of which villain the architecture happened to reach for. The infrastructure built up during the Iran coverage has not gone away. It has gone latent. The next event that supplies a Jewish or Israeli connection will reactivate it instantly, because the architecture itself was never dismantled.

One qualifier. Our corpus closed on April 26, before reports surfaced of writings recovered from Allen’s hotel room. What those documents revealed about his motive, they cannot affect the finding here. We are not diagnosing the shooter. We are diagnosing the commentariat.

Two things follow.

For those tracking online antisemitism: monitoring systems calibrated only to antisemitic markers will systematically miss what is actually happening. The threat to Jews is not located only in explicitly antisemitic comments. It is located in the universalization of the conspiratorial template that produces them whenever the conditions are right.

For those thinking about platform governance: we already know how to see this in close to real time. The bottleneck is not technical. It is institutional. Moving from documentation to early warning and intervention is a political choice, not a research problem.

The empty chair after the evacuation was Trump’s. The chair where antisemitism used to sit in this kind of discourse is, at most outlets this week, also empty. Neither absence is permanent.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism, the largest study of online antisemitism conducted in Europe, and now directs its successor project, Decoding Hate, at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. 

Alongside Iran’s persistent progress towards nuclear weapons, which was recently stemmed by Israel and the US, the Islamic regime possesses arsenals of other weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological weapons (CBW).

Now that its nuclear strategy has been largely derailed, the Iranian regime is likely to continue to pursue and to considerably upgrade its ballistic capabilities, particularly in terms of CBW warheads. Ballistic CBW warheads (possibly including radiological weapons as well) will thus constitute Iran’s primary strategic offensive alignment.

Iran has doggedly pursued the development and manufacture of CBW arsenals while being an ostensibly “obedient” state party to the global CBW conventions. Iran’s already operational CBW programs and first-generation weaponry inventories were expounded comprehensively in 2005, in a 52-page article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. The regime’s subsequent progress in the CBW field is examined below.

While some of its CBW facilities were somewhat incapacitated during the 2025-26 Israel-US attacks on Iran, the regime is liable — particularly now that it is likely to be deprived of its goal of achieving nuclear weapons — to take steps to significantly augment its CBW capacities.

First, we should note several assaults that took place during the 2025-26 conflict that apparently undermined some of Iran’s CBW-related assets (among other things). Nuclear and ballistic infrastructures across Iran were the attackers’ top-priority military-associated targets, but within six specific facilities, CBW-related assets were at times deliberately and directly damaged in parallel.

These facilities were: Malek-Ashtar University of Technology (MUT), Imam Hussein University (IHU), Shahid Beheshti University (SBU), Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), the Tofigh Daru Research and Engineering Company (ToDa), and the Shahid Meisami Research Center (SMRC).

Following the Russians

Two classes of toxic substances comprise the second-generation core of Iranian chemical warfare agents. They basically follow Russian courses, as detailed below.

Pharmaceutical-based agents (PBAs): This category of dose-dependent toxicants is used routinely for anesthetic procedures. Its use as a CBW broke out at the 2002 terrorism incident at a Moscow theater, where Russian security forces employed these substances against the perpetrators at the scene. Iran followed the same line. Ever since 2005, the regime has worked on designing incapacitating agents – mainly fentanyl and medetomidine plus their derivatives – to be used for dispersal via grenades, mortars, drones and bullets. Iran may also intend them to be employed by its regional proxy forces.

The IRGC is the central entity developing PBAs. Key contributors to this effort include IHU, MUT, and the SMRC. The IRGC has conducted open-air field tests involving incapacitant-filled hand grenades and cartridges (such as the 38mm MK 2) as dispersing mechanisms. The tests optimized various aerosolization techniques of those agents.

The potential deployment of these agents via drone is a significant concern. Deployment can take place via existing multi-rotor drones like the Arbaeen bomber, which can carry chemically converted grenades, cartridges and rounds. While no definitive evidence exists confirming extensive operational use of these agents in combat, it is notable that during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, in which female protesters, including schoolchildren, were key participants in the demonstrations, victims reported “feelings of anesthesia” inconsistent with standard tear gas as well as unexplained severe delayed impacts.

This group of substances is considerably more potent than ordinary incapacitants. Verified images confirm that MK 2 cartridges (manufactured by Shahid Sattari Industries in Iran) that matched those in hacked PBA development documents were used against Iranian civilians during the crackdowns. Anesthetic-derived tactical munitions were procured, with supporting production linked to the Chemical Industries and Development of Materials Group (affiliated with the Iranian Defense Industries Organization), in specialized, concealed production tunnels beneath Tehran’s District 22.

Furthermore, during the January 2026 protests, aerosolized fentanyl derivatives and medetomidine were employed, probably by means of weaponized grenades and canisters, mortars and projectiles, military-style vehicles equipped with dispersal systems, and drones. The resulting impacts included sudden collapse and immediate loss of consciousness, neurological impairment and mental disorientation, temporary muscle paralysis or acute inability to move, as well as delayed fatality.

As expected, the Iranian regime flatly denied having employed CW in these ways, just as it did about its conduct during the 2022 protests.

Novichok nerve agents: While the potency of the above-mentioned anesthetic agents is controversial due to their being critically dose-dependent, Novichok nerve agents are unequivocally the most toxic synthetic molecules ever created by man. They were initially developed by the Russians. Apart from the USSR (and NATO, in terms of protection), only Iran was (overtly, at least) working on Novichok agents, ostensibly on a scientific level alone. Yet the timing, uniqueness, focus, and meticulousness of Iran’s engagement with these agents are quite striking. According to a scientific paper published in 2016 by Iranian researchers, five Novichok agents – likely including at least some of the four weaponized by Russia – were synthesized at the Iranian Defense Chemical Research Laboratory (the above-referenced complex near Karaj). The syntheses were reportedly performed on a micro-scale to minimize exposure.

Iranian researchers succeeded in synthesizing and obtaining detailed mass spectral data on a series of unusual top nerve agents, and those data were added to the Central Analytical Database of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The Iranian researchers explained their study as follows: “For unambiguous identification of Chemical Weapons Convention-related chemicals in environmental samples, the availability of mass spectra, interpretation skills and rapid microsynthesis of suspected chemicals are essential requirements. For the first time… spectra of a series of Novichok agents related to CWC were collected and investigated with the aim of enriching the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database, which may be used in OPCW verification activities, on/off site analysis, and toxic chemical destruction monitoring.” Through this graceful means, the Iranians pursued both legitimacy and access to the domain of Novichok-based CW.

Biological warfare agents

While the first-generation of Iranian biological warfare agents includes traditional bacterial pathogens and toxins (see below), the second generation includes virulent viruses and sophisticated toxins, as follows.

Highly lethal snake venoms. Alongside synthetic toxic molecules (such as Novichok), one of the most poisonous natural substances in the world is the venom produced by the Caspian cobra. Like the class of PBAs dealt with by the Iranians in terms of dispersibility (as described), this venom was upgraded at Iran’s Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Karaj. This was done in several ways: by isolating lethal, low molecular weight portions of crude Caspian cobra venom by gel filtration chromatography; by encapsulating that venom into copolymer-shaped poly-microspheres in the size range of 1-10 μm as a biotoxin carrier; and through the advanced encapsulation into nanoparticles of a polysaccharide with an estimated diameter of 120-150 nanometers as a carrier.

These dual-use technologies are applicable to both pharmaceuticals and weapons design. Notably, while the Razi Institute is a fairly autonomous civilian entity, it is linked to both the Iranian Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture and is indirectly involved with the Iranian CBW weapons program and alignment. Crude Caspian cobra venom is centrifuged, frozen in a -80 °C deep freezer, and lyophilized at the Razi Institute.

Ostensibly, this product is used solely to attain an anti-venom horse serum. However, it is entirely plausible that an unknown portion of it is turned into a biological warfare agent alongside others developed in conjunction.

Highly virulent viruses. Deadly viruses that cause smallpox, influenza or hemorrhagic fevers might comprise components of Iran’s second generation of biological warfare agents.

Smallpox: Infections of the smallpox virus were last recorded in Iran in 1972. The reference strain, IRN72_tbrz, is held at the CDC in the US. It is not known whether additional virus isolates were obtained from Iranian patients and kept in Iran. What is known is that in recent years, the analogous virus – the one that causes monkeypox – has been reviewed at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, an institution known for its relationship with the IRGC. In parallel, further viruses that constitute the causative agents of notorious hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, Marburg, Rift Valley, Crimean-Congo, Chikungunia and dengue, were meticulously investigated at both Tarbiat Modares University and Islamic Azad University. The latter maintains close ties to the IRGC, particularly in terms of military research collaboration. It is not known whether the Ebola and Marburg viruses, which are exotic to Iran, have been obtained by it, but this is likely.

In 2007, a notable interface formed between Iran and Indonesia with regard to the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus, which emerged indigenously in Indonesia. While the global average mortality rate for H5N1 was about 60% (in humans), the rate in Indonesia was as high as 85% during 2005-07. A confrontation with WHO arose when Indonesia refused to share local virus samples with the organization. Iran took advantage and established a joint project with Indonesia to produce an H5N1 vaccine in Iran. The Iranian regime took possession of Indonesia’s extremely virulent strains in the process.

Finally, though it appears not to have been attacked in 2025-26, mention should be made of the Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences and its associated Institute of Research for Military Medicine (co-located in Vanak, Tehran), which are affiliated with and operated by the IRGC. These are premier Iranian institutions, leading R&D in cardinal areas like neuroscience, genetics, and biotechnology. As for CBW, while these institutions publicly focus on defense against such weapons, they are also oriented towards offensive aspects, covering a range of typical chemical and bio-agents like the pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, typhoid, cholera, botulism, staph-B enterotoxemia and certain fungal toxicoses. They also deal with traditional chemical warfare agents, including mustard, sarin, VX, soman, phosgene and cyanides.

By 2005, Iran already possessed sizable self-made stockpiles of operational CBW, composed of such traditional chem-bio warfare agents (plus ricin, aflatoxin and T-2 toxin). These agents were weaponized with various delivery systems, including aerial bombs, spraying tanks, unmanned aircraft, and unitary missile warheads. These constitute Iran’s first-generation CBW. The systems concerned have been gradually upgraded ever since in terms of quality of the agents in the payloads, spreading mechanisms, and range.

Moreover, during the 2026 war, Iran demonstrated its mastery of the effective delivery of conventional cluster (bomblet) warheads, particularly warheads of ballistic missiles. In all probability, Iran tried over the past decade to weaponize cluster warheads with chemical and biological weapons, which would be a meaningful force multiplier.

If self-production of ballistic missiles is continuously blocked or halted in Iran, the regime may either convert residual stocks of conventional warheads into CB warheads or purchase ballistic missiles with empty warheads from China, Russia or North Korea for the purpose of chemically and biologically supplementing them. At least one of the three allies is likely to consent to such a supply request.

In addition to CB warheads, we must consider the possibility of Iranian radiological warheads, which is not negligible. As long as it is deprived of the ability to obtain nuclear weapons, Iran will maximize its efforts to achieve sub-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, notwithstanding its position as a state party to the conventions banning such weapons.

The Iranian regime’s prolonged and filthy maneuvering in these arenas will undoubtedly persist. The damage inflicted upon the six attacked facilities was considerable and important, certainly, but will not severely hamper Iran’s renewed efforts to procure further upgrades to its CBW armaments.

Dr. Dany Shoham is a former senior analyst in IDF military intelligence and the Ministry of Defense. He specializes in chemical and biological warfare in the Middle East and worldwide. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.