The degradation of the word “antisemitism” – its conversion from the name of hatred into an accusation of bad faith – is not an accident of polarized discourse. It is a funded project with measurable returns, and the institutions responsible for fighting antisemitism should treat it as adversary infrastructure rather than as noise surrounding their work.
There is a precedent for what is being attempted, and it succeeded. Before 1978, “Orientalist” was a profession. The word described the scholars who cataloged Arabic manuscripts and compiled the grammars and dictionaries on which the study of the Middle East still depends. Then Edward Said published Orientalism, and within a generation the word was an accusation.
Whatever the merits of Said’s argument – historians have contested them for nearly 50 years – the operational result is not contested. No scholar today will accept the label.
The term carries its own verdict; the verdict arrives before any evidence, and entire lines of inquiry become professionally hazardous not because they are refuted but because their name has been made toxic.
Said did not win every argument. He won the word.
The word, now under attack, has its own biography, and it clarifies what is being unbuilt.
“Antisemitism” entered political life in 1879 with Wilhelm Marr, the German agitator who founded the League of Antisemites and wanted a term his movement could wear in public – scientific-sounding, an upgrade on vulgar Jew-hatred. For two generations, parties campaigned under it; Karl Lueger won Vienna’s city hall with it.
What made the word unwearable was not an argument. It was Auschwitz. The cost attached to “antisemite” is not a natural property of language; it is a postwar settlement, purchased at a price everyone knows.
The current campaign is an attempt to reopen that settlement – to return the word to what it was for Marr’s generation: a position that could be held in public without consequence.
The actors are ideologically incompatible – white nationalists, Islamist propagandists, engagement-driven media personalities, parts of the activist Left – and they do not coordinate. They converge because they share a problem: Jew-hatred loses in the open. Holocaust denial loses in the open. The Protocols lose in the open.
So the campaign does not defend the hatred. It attacks the name. Antisemitism is recast as a smear, an industry, a career-ending weapon deployed by the powerful against the honest. Under this framing, every use of the word becomes evidence of bad faith. The person who names the hatred becomes the aggressor. The person who spreads it becomes the censored truth-teller.
When the House introduced a bipartisan resolution this spring condemning antisemitic content from two of America’s most-watched online personalities – one far-left, one far-right – the first-named streamer answered on script: the resolution itself, he said, was what was worsening antisemitism. The conduct was not defended. The naming was indicted.
The mechanism was visible in unusually clean form last autumn. In October 2025, Tucker Carlson gave a largely unchallenged two-hour platform to Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and open admirer of Hitler.
When criticism came – much of it from conservatives – the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, released a video defending Carlson and describing the critics as a “venomous coalition” of globalists. At least five members of the think tank’s own antisemitism task force resigned in protest; three trustees followed.
The structure of the response is the point: the institution’s reflex located the offense not in the platforming of a Holocaust denier but in the naming of it. That reflex is the campaign’s product, and it now operates inside the movement’s flagship institutions.
The campaign is an investment because degradation pays twice. It pays directly. A joint study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs analyzed 679,000 antisemitic posts on X/Twitter over a single year and found 10 accounts drove roughly a third of total engagement, six carried paid verification, and three sold subscriptions.
When Ye released a song titled “Heil Hitler” on the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat, the major platforms removed it, and it drew some 10 million views on X within days; each removal was converted into new content about persecution.
Reporting this summer describes individual hate streamers earning six figures a month. And it pays indirectly: every point subtracted from the credibility of the word “antisemitism” is a point added to the operating freedom of the people the word describes. The claim of being silenced by the charge is not a defense of the business model. It is the business model.
The historical front is load-bearing. The audiences now reachable by revisionism are larger than at any point since 1945: Churchill recast as the true villain of World War II before millions, the Holocaust reframed as leverage rather than fact, the war relitigated by podcast.
The method is familiar to any historian. It is not necessary to forge an archive if the archivists can be discredited, and it is not necessary to refute a record if the people who keep it can be made suspect by category.
The maneuver also has a theory behind it, and the theory has a supply chain. Said built Orientalism on Michel Foucault’s claim that categories of knowledge are instruments of power, and on Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony – political victory prepared in culture and vocabulary before it is won in institutions.
The European New Right read the same texts and drew the operational conclusion: Alain de Benoist’s school named the method metapolitics and described itself, without embarrassment, as Gramscian. From the seminars the strategy descended to the streamers, who do not footnote Gramsci and do not need to.
The logic is complete on its own terms: if naming is a form of power, then breaking the name is a seizure of power – cheaper than defending the hatred, and more durable than winning any single argument.
The maneuver works because it begins from partly true material. The charge of antisemitism has at times been used carelessly and instrumentally; language about the “weaponizing” of antisemitism accusations now appears in the findings of proposed federal legislation, and the academic literature argues that overuse has debased the term.
Said, too, had genuine chauvinists to point to.
The abuse of the word
There is an American precedent for where this goes. The promiscuous use of the communist charge in the 1950s did not only injure the innocent; by degrading the category, it granted cover to the guilty, and espionage that the Venona decrypts would later confirm had become impolite to allege.
The abuse of an accusation does not retire the conduct it names. It manufactures immunity for it. A delegitimization campaign does not require its target to be guilty in general. It requires a true exception, repeated until the exception is the category – until the word means nothing but the abuse of the word.
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who survived the Third Reich in Dresden, kept a secret notebook on the regime’s language and concluded that Nazism installed itself in speech before it installed itself in law. He compared its words to “tiny doses of arsenic,” swallowed unnoticed until the toxin works.
The observation transfers. There is a control case, and I lived inside it. In Mosul under Islamic State rule, I kept a record of the caliphate anonymously, because the penalty for documentation was death. A regime of eliminationist hatred did not fear the vocabulary deployed against it; no label carried a cost the caliphate recognized.
What it policed was the record – names, dates, graves, what was done to whom. Hatred in power is indifferent to accusation and allergic to evidence. The campaign now underway in the West proceeds from the same understanding in reverse: where the label still carries a cost, the label itself becomes the target.
The costs of its progress are not rhetorical. Last week, the J7 task force – the major Jewish organizations of the seven largest diaspora communities – reported that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence outside Israel since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.
Twenty people were murdered – 15 at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, two at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, Israeli Embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, and one woman at a Run for Their Lives hostage-awareness walk in Boulder, Colorado.
Said’s victory had a limit worth stating precisely. He could make “Orientalist” unusable. He could not make the manuscripts disappear, and the scholarship survived wherever it rested on the archive rather than on the label.
The equivalent limit applies here, and the campaign’s architects appear to understand it: the pressure is already moving from the word to the record-keepers – the task forces, the researchers, the databases, the programs that document the networks, and the money.
Whether the institutions fighting antisemitism treat the defense of that record as core infrastructure, funded and staffed as such, or continue to spend themselves defending the word alone, will determine what remains usable when this campaign has run its course. The word can be degraded. The record can only be abandoned.
Dr. Omar Mohammed, the historian known as “Mosul Eye,” is director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative and a Senior Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, and teaches at Sciences Po. A former UNESCO senior consultant, he holds a Ph.D. from EHESS in Paris, France. His book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, was published in July.