Alex Goldenberg, founder and principal of Silent Index LLC, a national security advisory and research consultancy, is a senior fellow at the Rutgers University Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience and an affiliate with NYU’s Institute for the Study of Emerging Threats. Goldenberg spoke to an August 10 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
“Each arrived at their own conclusion that antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment are useful weapons against the United States.”
Four main Western adversaries—Russia, Iran, China, and Qatar—know they cannot replicate the capability of the U.S-Israel partnership that successfully coordinated and executed Operation Epic Fury’s attack against Tehran’s Islamic regime on February 28. Cognizant of the asymmetry, these foes seek to weaken the West by launching “a confluence of campaigns” and influence operations designed to sow division and fracture the political consensus. “Each arrived at their own conclusion that antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment are useful weapons against the United States.”
In 1903, the Russian secret police fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tzarist forgery that influenced Adolf Hitler and is “the single most widely circulated antisemitic text in history.” During the Soviet era, the KGB secret police “built their entire disinformation strategy” around its success. In the 1960s, the Soviets targeted the Western alliance through “active measures,” the KGB term for covert and overt political warfare aimed at influencing and manipulating populations using disinformation, subversion, and propaganda.
Aleksandr Dugin, Russian strategist and veteran of Soviet-era antisemitic movements, “calls on Russian special services to encourage separatism, and ethnic, social, and racial conflict inside the United States of America.” On February 28, Dugin amplified Iranian state media accounts by “calling for a global insurrection against the United States and Israel.” In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a federal indictment against a Russian covert influence operation, Doppelganger, for paying American influencers to reach a massive audience via social media.
Social media influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson latch onto Russian conspiracy theories and promote debunked narratives. To fracture the West, outlandish allegations originating in Moscow blame the Jews for causing global ills, from the Ukraine war to the U.S. war with Iran, to even Dugin’s currently bizarre accusation that Jews worship child-sacrificing “Baal.”
The West’s malign foreign actors spread their propaganda through “a burgeoning antisemitism attention economy” using social media influencers in the West. These influencers, like Owens and Carlson on the right and Hasan Piker on the left, find that trafficking in antisemitic conspiracy theories is politically and economically expedient. The problem is that there is tolerance for antisemitism which is increasingly seen as the “acceptable cost of doing political business on both sides of the aisle now.” The influencers who join for ideological reasons are further encouraged to do so “because this controversy drives engagement, and the engagement drives revenue, and the algorithms at these social media platforms reward all of it.”
In Shanghai, China, billionaire tech entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans of Code Pink, supply “the street infrastructure” for anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives and movements.
Since the strikes on Iran, the regime is escalating its operational influence campaigns “to pry at America’s political fault lines and drive up the domestic cost of staying in the fight.” Through its Masaf Institute, Iran’s propaganda operation has for years had a hashtag campaign on the anniversary of the USS Liberty incident. Its aim is to exacerbate fault lines between Israel and the U.S. In 1967, during Israel’s Six-Day War, Israeli pilots mistook a U.S. naval vessel in the Sinai Peninsula for an enemy Egyptian ship and attacked it, resulting in many American deaths. The Iranian campaign successfully penetrated the Turning Point USA conference where young activists confronted Jewish conservatives. “Once these things reach their tipping point, the provenance essentially doesn’t matter anymore, which is why the attribution work is really important early on in these operations.”
In Shanghai, China, billionaire tech entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans of Code Pink, supply “the street infrastructure” for anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives and movements. By funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into groups promoting Chinese Communist Party propaganda, Singham and Evans spread this propaganda to public and private sectors, such as Code Pink, Answer Coalition, and the Peoples Forum, that target the West. Since 2024, Congress has been conducting investigations into these networks and affiliated nonprofits. Although charges are yet to be filed, Singham is being subpoenaed for his role in a money-laundering scheme over the past decade.
Qatar, “the single largest foreign donor in U.S. higher education,” poured more than $7 billion into American universities since 1986. Qatari leverage over universities through the Qatar Foundation affects what gets taught and who gets hired. For the last decade, Qatar’s Doha Forum has cultivated the media to influence Western audiences by hosting American media figures, including Tucker Carlson.
Although Russia, China, Iran and Qatar don’t necessarily agree with each other ideologically, the one instrument on which they converge because of its efficiency is antisemitism. It is effective in four ways: (1) it delegitimizes Israel as a partner; (2) it splits both American parties simultaneously; (3) it feeds anti-interventionist narratives to tie American hands abroad; and (4) it exploits a pre-existing ancient vulnerability. The result is “convergence without coordination.”
During the Reagan years of the Cold War, when foreign adversaries engaged in active measures to divide America, the U.S. fought information warfare with an active measure working group. It exposed Soviet disinformation as a means to dismantle our adversary on the asymmetric battlefield of information operations. An unfortunate casualty of President Trump’s second term, which left America blindsided during the current war with Iran, was gutting the government’s Global Engagement Center. The center coordinated interagency efforts in countering foreign disinformation and propaganda campaigns. However, in a promising development, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense report that there is more funding to identify and counter foreign influence operations.
Lawfare is an effective way to counter increasing antisemitism because more and more violence perpetrated against Jews is linked to the lies that “cross the threshold to incitement.”
There needs to be greater coordination by the government with analysts, AI companies, social media platforms, and nonprofits to build a consortium or working group to counter malign foreign influence. It is about not only addressing the security needs of Jewish citizens, but the safety and security of the U.S. Address influence operations that are anti-American and antisemitic and that target any other vulnerable community the same way any hostile intelligence activity would be treated. “Map the network, establish attribution, and then, most importantly, impose a cost.” Lawfare is an effective way to counter increasing antisemitism because more and more violence perpetrated against Jews is linked to the lies that “cross the threshold to incitement.” Leverage lawfare to create economic and legal costs for amplifying inciteful lies that lead to violence.
“February 28 really showed us what this partnership between the United States and Israel can do when the political will is there to use it. Our adversaries are worried about this intelligence partnership, and because they can’t degrade the capability itself, they’ve spent decades degrading the will instead, and they will continue to do so.”
