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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
A new Massachusetts bill seeks to revive the moribund “diversity, equity, and inclusion” regime by fast-tracking Muslims into government jobs.
How do they plan on rationalizing preferential treatment for one religious minority? Not to worry, say the bill’s sponsors, there’s already a precedent — Massachusetts’s 2024 Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.
But that commission’s purpose wasn’t to place Jews in the commonwealth’s bureaucracy. It was rather to tackle a particular form of hatred dating back millennia and on the rise over the last few years in Massachusetts and other states across the country. And that surge is due in part to waves of immigration from Muslim-majority regions of the world where Jew-hatred is prevalent. Thus, by facilitating the appointment of Muslims to state administrative posts, the real purpose of the bill is to surreptitiously advance antisemitic policies by eliminating antisemitism as a specific category of hatred.
The American Muslim Inclusion Bill, which may be taken up in Massachusetts’s next legislative session, appears to be the work of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that federal prosecutors have linked to Hamas networks inside the United States.
CAIR’s Massachusetts chapter furnished the bill’s sponsors with the only evidence of anti-Muslim discrimination with a survey showing that 48% of Muslim public-school students said they were bullied because of their faith.
Obviously, carving out jobs for Muslim adults doesn’t address real or perceived discrimination against Muslim teens. But that’s not the point. CAIR was founded to influence American policymakers against Israel and promote Palestinianism. Filling state governments with bureaucrats who hate Israel and resent Jewish influence in the U.S. political system aids that cause. And from the perspective of anti-Israel activists, driving down support for the Jewish state also requires diluting the sinister particularity of antisemitism.
Enumerating antisemitism as only one among many forms of hatred has of late become a regular feature of American political discourse, starting it seems with Barack Obama. The 44th U.S.president was virtually incapable of condemning Jew-hatred on its own terms and instead habitually folded it into a larger catalogue of racism and bigotry. It seemed he saw International Holocaust Remembrance Day as annual opportunity to water down antisemitism by joining it to prejudice, intolerance, bigotry and, as he said in 2010, “hatred in all its forms.” The next year, he called on the world “to stand up against prejudice, stereotyping, and violence — including the scourge of antisemitism.” And in 2012, he contended “‘Never again’ is a challenge to reject hatred in all of its forms — including antisemitism.”
The Democrats all but institutionalized Obama’s tic after Congresswoman Ilhan Omar accused U.S. officials of dual loyalty and alleged their support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins” in 2019. Senior Democrats were offended by her remarks and prepared a resolution condemning antisemitism, but Omar’s progressive peers objected. Because singling out hatred of Jews would privilege the Jews, the resolution was revised to acknowledge “harm suffered by Muslims from harassment, discrimination and violence caused by anti-Muslim bigotry.”
Congressman Ted Deutch, then one of the House’s most prominent Jewish Democrats, objected from the chamber floor: “Why are we unable to singularly condemn antisemitism? Why can’t we call it antisemitism and show that we’ve learned the lessons of history?”
Because the purpose of the revision was not only to win points with Muslim voters that Democrats saw as an increasingly important part of their base — it was also to shield Omar and other Muslim antisemites. After all, how can she be accused of antisemitism if she’s a victim of Islamophobia?
If the left views watering down the evils of antisemitism as a way to defend and empower the Muslim minority, recently some senior Republicans have seen it as a prop to legitimize the grievances of America’s white and Christian majority. Democrats, Vice President JD Vance acknowledged in June, were becoming “anti-Semitic” — but, he added, also “anti-Christian” and “anti-White.” In July, Vance said: “I see antisemitism spreading” — and rising “anti-Christian bias,” “anti-White bias.” According to Vance, ripping a page from Obama’s script, “we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred.”
Yes, of course all forms of hatred are bad, but antisemitism is different, and the numbers show it. In New York, the second-largest Jewish city in the world after Tel Aviv, Jews comprise only approximately 10% of the population, but in 2024 hate crimes against Jews made up 54% of all reported incidents, and in 2025 the number rose to 57%.
Over the first six months of this year, since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office, 55.3% of reported hate crimes in New York have targeted Jews.
Nationwide, anti-Jewish incidents constituted approximately 16% of all reported hate crimes in 2024, even though Jews are only about 2% of the U.S. population. The same year, Jews were targeted in nearly 70% of all religion-based hate crimes, with 1,938 anti-Jewish incidents, the highest number recorded since the FBI began collecting these statistics in 1991.
There’s also the historical dimension, as Deutch noted, that distinguishes antisemitism from other forms of hate. There is no record of anti-black or anti-Asian racism or any other still extant bigotry that dates back to classical antiquity and courses through the Middle Ages then European modernity up to the present. Over that period, despite the variable demented rationales given for Jew-hatred (theological, political, racial, etc.), the constant is the obsessive hatred of Jews that has frequently led to the murder of Jews, from Europe to the Middle East.
Antisemitism is not like other forms of hate because it’s not just bigotry — it’s also, and most dangerously, the articulation of a pathological worldview. There are no other forms of hatred that accuse its victims of killing God or betraying nations — no other people who are scapegoated for problems global and local, no other ethnic or racial group that broken individuals the world over hold accountable for their failures large and small. Antisemitism is different because it’s the form that unreason and madness have taken in mass politics for thousands of years.
