People attend the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) rally in London, Britain, March 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy

A dangerous shift happens when people stop feeling responsible for verifying what they believe. The accusation itself becomes enough. Once institutions repeat something with enough confidence, many decent people hand over their judgment completely. They assume somebody else has already checked the facts.

That is where real danger begins.

A case is being built against Israel in international courts, and much of the public discussion around it already feels emotionally settled long before most people have examined a single document, testimony, or legal standard for themselves.

The International Court of Justice has no meaningful conflict-of-interest mechanism comparable to what people would expect in many domestic legal systems. UN reports and secondary claims enter public discourse carrying the weight of institutional authority, even when the underlying sources were never cross-examined or independently verified in a courtroom setting.

At a certain point, the accusation itself becomes proof.

That pattern extends far beyond a courtroom. Perception gets taken over before a person realizes his or her thinking has been outsourced. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates emotional certainty. Eventually people stop asking where the information came from in the first place.

Jewish history carries enough experience with this pattern to recognize it early. A claim repeated often enough starts feeling like an established truth even before evidence exists to support it.

Once institutions absorb the accusation, the public no longer experiences skepticism as responsibility. Skepticism starts feeling like disobedience.

Artificial intelligence is about to accelerate this problem even further. AI systems absorb dominant narratives faster than human beings can examine them critically. Once a version of events becomes widely indexed, cited, repeated, and emotionally reinforced, it enters the system as background truth. The next generation encounters conclusions first and context later.

That matters because most people do not independently investigate history, legal claims, or war. They inherit understanding socially. Search engines shape it. Institutions shape it. Algorithms shape it. Repetition shapes it.

The responsibility for your own safety begins before the threat fully arrives. Physical self-defense taught me that years ago. Cognitive self-defense follows the same principle. A society that loses the ability to question emotionally satisfying accusations becomes vulnerable to manipulation at a scale far larger than any courtroom.

People once understood that serious accusations required serious proof. Today, institutional confidence often replaces evidence in the public mind. That shift should concern anyone who still believes good intentions alone are enough to protect people from participating in injustice.

Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.

A meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council at the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar in the West Bank, July 12, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.

The Eighth Fatah Conference continued to glorify past Palestinian terrorist murderers while building the next generation of terrorist leadership.

PA and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas decided that all prisoners who were incarcerated for more than 20 years — meaning those who were guilty of murder or attempted murder — automatically would become part of the Palestinian leadership and thus were able to participate and vote at the conference, which took place this past weekend.

The consequence of this is that a total of 388 Palestinians, who as prisoners were presented as role models, just transitioned into becoming PA leaders.

A senior Fatah youth leader described the importance: “We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them.”

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has shown repeatedly exactly how the PA and Fatah, as policy, portray murderers of Jews as role models for all Palestinians, and especially youth:

Official PA TV newsreader: “The prisoners [i.e., terrorists] will also have prominent representation in the [Eighth Fatah] Conference, there will be participation of more than 388 prisoners who have served more than 20 years in the occupation’s [i.e., Israeli] prisons…”

Fatah Shabiba Youth Movement Secretariat member Tasami Ramadan: “The participation of the [released] prisoners this time in this conference… is a very qualitative addition... seeing this qualitative and special addition that our released prisoners will contribute, as they are not just released prisoners and we cannot summarize them only as such.

They are also [figures] of national stature and national pillars who have outlined the characteristics of Fatah’s path, and they are also spiritual and organizational pillars. We have a great opportunity as Fatah youth … to learn from them and to be their partners in building Fatah’s political decision.” [emphasis added]

[Official PA TV News, May 8, 2026]

A Fatah spokesman further legitimized the participation of released terrorists in Fatah’s leadership conference as they “precede everything” and are held “in highest regard:”

Fatah Spokesman and Eighth Fatah Conference preparatory committee member Iyad Abu Zneit: “The composition of the [Eighth Fatah] Conference is diverse and rich … Of course, the released prisoners [are also represented], as they precede everything.

I will emphasize that the leadership insisted on there being broad representation for the [released] prisoners at this conference… The group of prisoners that these ones represent from among those in the Fatah Movement also constitutes a significant number [of members], a large number, who have their own role, and we hold them in the highest regard. They have the right to be partners in Fatah, in the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council, in the leadership of the [Fatah] Central Committee, and in any place they can reach.” [emphasis added]

[Official PA TV, Topic of the Day, May 6, 2026]

PMW exposed last week that among the Fatah members at the Eighth General Conference and those running for Fatah leadership positions are released prisoners responsible for the murder of 75 people while some of the most venerated figures at the conference included arch-terrorist murderers Abu Iyad, who planned the Munich Olympics massacre, and Abu Jihad, who was responsible for the murder of 125 people.

The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared. 

FBI agents work on the site after the Michigan State Police reported an active shooting incident at the Temple Israel Synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, US, March 12, 2026. Photo: Rebecca Cook via Reuters Connect

When the American Psychological Association (APA) posts about identity-based discrimination, the moral logic is clear. A targeted group is hurting. Hatred causes psychological harm. A professional organization responds with empathy, clarity, and support.

But when Jews are the victims, the script changes. Even the expression of sympathy becomes controversial.

A post about antisemitism, or even about how to help children process anti-Jewish hate, does not invite solidarity. It invites argument. Suffering becomes contested. The comment section shifts from care to qualification: “What about Palestine?” “Is this really antisemitism?” “Aren’t Jews privileged?”

This is not an argument against political discourse, nor a claim that complex geopolitical realities should be ignored. It’s narrower and more urgent: harm directed at Jews should be recognized as harm before it is reframed as politics. When empathy becomes contingent on political alignment, it ceases to be empathy at all.

In other words, even basic empathy for Jews becomes controversial.

That double standard should alarm anyone who cares about mental health, professional ethics, or the integrity of anti-bias work. And the double standard itself is a part of modern conceptualizations of antisemitism.

To be clear, the issue is not that professional organizations fail to condemn antisemitism. The APA has repeatedly publicly addressed antisemitism.The problem is what happens next. When support is offered to Jews, the support itself is often treated as suspect.

When the APA speaks about racial injustice, the message is generally allowed to stand on its own terms: identity-based hate causes harm and psychologists should respond with care. The underlying legitimacy of the harm is rarely put on trial.

But when the same institution speaks about antisemitism, the response often shifts from recognition to resistance.

One of the clearest contrasts came from APA posts related to antisemitism and the attack at Temple Israel. The problem was not merely disagreement. Comments deteriorated into whataboutism, collective blame, and overt hostility toward Jews, severe enough that APA disabled comments to prevent the platform from becoming a forum for hate speech.

By contrast, posts about racism did not require moderation. It points to something specific and troubling: when the APA posts support for Jews, the support itself becomes publicly contested and institutionally disruptive.

The claim is not that Jews suffer more than any other minority. It is that Jews are treated differently in a specific and recognizable way: their pain is more likely to be debated and invalidated.

When identity-based harm is denied, it does not disappear. It becomes trauma.

The response is as important as the original injury. When individuals or communities are targeted and then told that their fear is exaggerated, that they deserve it, or that they are unworthy of recognition, the harm compounds.

That is precisely what these comment patterns reveal.

In the Temple Israel thread, the responses followed a familiar sequence. First: whataboutism: demands to redirect a statement about an antisemitic attack into a geopolitical debate. Then, collective blame: holding Jews at a synagogue or preschool responsible for the actions of a foreign government. Then victim-blaming: suggesting the attack was understandable or deserved. Then conspiracy: claims of fabrication. And finally, explicit anti-Jewish animus: language portraying Jews as bloodthirsty, deceitful, or oppressive.

This is not just a social media phenomenon. It is psychologically meaningful.

The message to Jewish readers is clear: sympathy is conditioned on how they respond to interrogation, even in times of vulnerability. Time and again, Jews are asked to litigate their own suffering.

Psychologists should know better. This is a profession built on understanding trauma, minority stress, shame, exclusion, and the consequences of chronic invalidation. If psychologists can recognize harm when it affects every group except Jews, then something more than inconsistency is at work. That is not cultural competence. It is ideological capture.

This comes from a movement in the mental health professions called decolonial psychology. This approach is expressly political, ideological, demands clinicians become activists, and has a foundation that includes anti-Zionism, a specific form of anti-Jewish identity discrimination.

And once a profession begins filtering human suffering through ideology, it forfeits its credibility.

This extends beyond the Jewish community. If one group’s pain can be endlessly qualified, the moral foundation of anti-bias work begins to erode. If one minority must meet a political threshold to receive basic human concern, then the concern itself has become corrupted.

The demand here is not for special treatment. It is for equal treatment.

That this has become difficult is not a commentary on Jews. It is a condemnation of us.

The moral failure is not the statement. The failure is the society that made the statement controversial, and until that is named, Jews will remain trapped in a grotesque exception: visible enough to be blamed, but never legitimate enough to be comforted.

Miri Bar-Halpern is a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Dean McKay is a Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. Josh Simmons is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified Jungian psychoanalyst.

All three authors are members of the Collaborative of Jewish Psychologists, a group appointed by the American Psychological Association. The opinions in this article are solely those of the authors.