On April 13, Tucker Carlson told the readers of his morning newsletter that “President Trump is a slave to Israel.” Two days later, 40 of the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block sales of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. A month after that, federal prosecutors charged an Iraqi national with plotting to attack a prominent New York synagogue and Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Ariz., on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Kata’ib Hizballah; a grand jury indicted him on May 28.
American politics now carries three distinct antisemitisms, each with its own origin, its own picture of the Jew, and its own goal.
The three events are not equivalent. The first is a pundit’s smear, the second a policy judgment, the third a crime. Read together, though, they show what Americans miss when they treat antisemitism as a partisan scorecard, each side tallying the other’s offenses and excusing its own. American politics now carries three distinct antisemitisms, each with its own origin, its own picture of the Jew, and its own goal. For all those differences, all three push Washington toward the same policy: distancing the United States from Israel. The regime that gains most from that outcome is Iran’s.
At the extreme, each of the three has killed Jews in America or tried to: the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman in 2018, the Capital Jewish Museum gunman in 2025, and the Iranian-backed plot against a New York synagogue alleged this spring. That violence belongs to the fringe. This essay is about the mainstream, where the three meet not in attacks but in policy.
A Doctrine with a State
Islamist antisemitism is hatred of Jews grounded in a reading of Islamic scripture and organized as a political program. It teaches that Jews are enemies of Islam by nature and that a Jewish state on land once ruled by Muslims must be destroyed. The 1988 Hamas charter quotes a hadith holding that the Day of Judgment will not come “until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews).” Ali Khamenei called Israel “a deadly, cancerous tumor,” and his regime built what Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei, writing in the Middle East Quarterly, call a propaganda industry to carry that message abroad. What sets this version apart is that a government stands behind it, with an army, treasury, foreign ministry, and armed proxies such as Kata’ib Hizballah.
American commentary often softens the doctrine into grievance, resistance, or a reaction to Israeli policy. The softening fails when an American spokesman says the quiet part aloud. When Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in November 2023 that he “was happy to see” Gazans “breaking the siege” on October 7, even the Biden White House condemned the remarks as antisemitic. Washington has begun to treat the threat as a security matter: in January, the Treasury and State Departments designated the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. Scrutiny of the money has lagged. Qatar, Hamas’s longtime host, was the largest foreign source of funds to American universities in 2025, at more than $1.1 billion.
The Disloyal Insider
Right-wing antisemitism is older than the State of Israel and owes nothing to Islam. It stems from the European conspiracy theory that Jews are a foreign body inside the nation: a disloyal minority that secretly steers a country’s money, media, and government. The man who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 wrote minutes before the attack that a Jewish refugee agency “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.”
That is the difference from the Islamist version. Islamist antisemitism treats Jews as a religious enemy, and its target is Israel, which it wants destroyed. Right-wing antisemitism treats Jews as untrustworthy neighbors, and its target is their influence at home. Israel interests it mainly as proof of that disloyalty.
Surveys that test the old canards, that Jews have too much power or are more loyal to Israel than to America, find them most common among young adults on the far right.
Surveys that test the old canards, that Jews have too much power or are more loyal to Israel than to America, find them most common among young adults on the far right. Eitan Hersh of Tufts and Laura Royden of Harvard reached that finding in a survey of 3,500 Americans taken in November 2020, and the Yale Youth Poll found the same pattern among “extremely conservative” young voters in 2025. Those questions measure the right’s vocabulary. They capture little of the left’s, which speaks of Israel rather than of Jews.
Those attitudes no longer stay on the fringe. In October 2025, Carlson gave Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes a friendly interview, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition.”
Applied to foreign policy, the theory produces the charge of dual loyalty. Opposing the Iran war is a legitimate position. Carlson’s explanation for it is of a different kind: he says the United States went in “at the behest and demand of Israel.” He offers no evidence. For those who already hold the older belief that Jews control the governments they live under, none is needed.
The Oppressor Nation
Left-wing antisemitism grows from a theory of oppression rather than a theology or a conspiracy. It divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, files Jews and Israel among the oppressors as white, colonial, and powerful, and concludes that the Jewish people, alone among nations, has no right to a state. Because it presents itself as opposition to Israel rather than to Jews, it seldom uses the old language of Jewish power. Its mark is that it holds Jews anywhere answerable for Israel and treats Israel’s supporters as fair targets. On May 21, 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and shouted “free, free Palestine” after his arrest; a federal grand jury indicted him on hate-crime charges.
In a December 2023 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 67 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 agreed that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as such.”
This version supplies the slogans of the crowds that have filled campuses and city streets since October 7, 2023, and it seldom marches alone. Its usual partner is the first of the three. The revolutionary left and political Islam have made common cause against Israel at least since parts of the Western left hailed Khomeini’s revolution in 1979; Craig Considine, a Middle East Forum writing fellow, joins others in calling the partnership the red-green alliance. Its campus wing shows the seam. Hatem Bazian, who helped found Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley in the 1990s, founded American Muslims for Palestine in 2006 and chairs it, and the ADL reports that AMP has long helped coordinate SJP’s activities. The ideas have reached the young. In a December 2023 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 67 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 agreed that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as such.”
In mainstream politics, this version shows itself less in what progressive leaders say than in what they decline to rule out. Asked on Meet the Press to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” Zohran Mamdani answered, “That’s not language that I use.” On his first day as mayor of New York, he revoked the city’s orders barring divestment from Israel and adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
Where They Meet
The differences matter because each version calls for a different response. Islamist antisemitism has a state, money, and fighters behind it, making it a security problem to be met with designations, prosecutions, and sanctions. Right-wing antisemitism is a conspiracy theory moving into the conservative mainstream, and conservatives have the standing to push it back out. Left-wing antisemitism is an ideology that has become respectable on campuses and in city halls, and progressives have the standing to draw the line against it. Neither camp is excused from opposing all three.
Yet the three meet at one point: the demand that the United States step back from Israel. On July 15, that demand reached the House floor. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered an amendment to strip all $3.3 billion in aid to Israel. He was the only Republican to vote for it. Democrats supplied the other 103 votes, and it failed, 104 to 314.
Iran’s rulers have pledged to destroy Israel, and American aid and arms are much of what keeps Israel’s military ahead of Iran and its proxies. Every blocked sale and every cut dollar serves Tehran, whatever the motive of the member who casts the vote.
Voting against an aid package is not antisemitism, and most members who did so are not antisemites. The question is which arguments built the coalition. From the right came the claim that Israel has captured Washington; from the left, the claim that Israel is itself a colonial crime against indigenous peoples. Few in either camp take cues from Tehran, yet both arrive at the position Tehran has sought from Washington since 1979. Iran’s rulers have pledged to destroy Israel, and American aid and arms are much of what keeps Israel’s military ahead of Iran and its proxies. Every blocked sale and every cut dollar serves Tehran, whatever the motive of the member who casts the vote.
Some object to this framing. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, argues that “it’s critical to be able to make a distinction between bigotry against a group of people and criticism or condemnation of a state.” He is right, but the distinction cuts both ways. Criticism of an Israeli government is politics. Holding American Jews responsible for that government, claiming that Israel controls the American president, or denying Jews alone a national home is something else entirely, whoever says it.
Three conclusions follow. First, hold everyone to one standard. Conservatives should judge Carlson by the test they apply to Mamdani, and progressives should do the reverse; a party that polices only its rival’s antisemitism is keeping score, not fighting it. Second, Washington should treat Islamist antisemitism as the security threat it is: complete the Brotherhood designations, prosecute Iranian proxy plots on American soil, and enforce Section 117 of the Higher Education Act so that foreign gifts to American universities, including those from Gulf states, are fully disclosed. Third, editors and hosts should call out the dual-loyalty charge, and the claim that Jews everywhere answer for Israel, every time either one airs.
The three antisemitisms start in different places: a theology in Tehran, a conspiracy theory on the right, an ideology on the left. They end at the same roll call, and Tehran is counting the votes.
