No Holiday from Antisemitic Terror

Dear Weekend Jolter,

It is only natural to feel a sense of despair after last weekend’s Hanukkah terror attack in Australia. Despair, because antisemitic attacks and antisemitism generally are fast becoming an emblem of the time.

Charles C. W. Cooke, in the new issue of the magazine, acknowledges that policy answers are painfully elusive in the face of the return of the world’s oldest hatred:

As a conservative, I am most definitely not of the view that there is some pat solution to all of our problems that, if implemented with vigor, will lead us into sunlit uplands. But, usually, I at least have a handful of thoughts. Here, I did not. I have no idea what to do about the dismal rise of global antisemitism, and I have no idea what to do about the scourge of mass killings, either. Put them together, as the perpetrators did in Australia, and I am bewildered beyond words.

We can reckon, at least, with the roots of the violence. The answer is not, simply: Israel. What would a ten-year-old girl whose parents arrived from Ukraine have to do with the Middle East? Noah Rothman, citing other incidents including a chaotic demonstration in Amsterdam outside a Hanukkah concert and a shoot-up at a Hanukkah-decorated California home as someone shouted “F*** the Jews,” writes,

The precipitating incident for these calculated acts of savagery wasn’t anything that took place in Israel or the Palestinian territories. The event that moved bloodthirsty assassins and mobs alike to terroristic violence was the first few nights of Hanukkah and the ostentatious displays of Judaic pride that accompany its celebration.

The international Jewish diaspora has come to expect its torment. That’s why expensive private security forces guard every synagogue, every Jewish day school. It’s why Jewish community centers spend exorbitant sums constructing airlock vestibules to evaluate potential threats before they gain access to teachers and children. It’s why Jewish events don’t reveal their location, even to attendees, until 24 hours out — just to give their would-be murderers less time to prepare.

None of that is new, although it is getting appreciably worse. And none of it has anything to do with the Jewish state’s geostrategic initiatives. These are the toxic fruits of a vile Jew hatred that had become observably more pronounced long before Hamas terrorists cascaded over Israel’s borders on October 7.

That hatred is nationless. It observes no borders. The FBI just announced a foiled plot to bomb sites throughout Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, though the pro-Palestinian group involved appears to align with what Noah likened to “salad bar” terrorism: a mixture of beliefs, in this case anti-government and anti-capitalist, used to justify political violence. Back east, the NYPD is probing two possible antisemitic hate crimes, one involving Orthodox men who were confronted on a train to Crown Heights by suspects who allegedly yelled “F*** the Jews” and “I’ll kill you,” the other involving a man stabbed near Chabad World Headquarters. “Unfortunately, this Hanukkah became a hunting ground against Jews, all around the world,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon said, per CBS.

While there is no catch-all policy answer to this dismal rise, one place for governments to start would be to recognize the problem by name -- antisemitic violence -- and take sensible security steps to combat it. From NR’s editorial on the Bondi Beach attack:

We wish we could say this horrific event was shocking, but unfortunately, it is not. Australian authorities had been put on notice about the dangerous rise of antisemitism in recent years and have not taken the threat seriously. Just this month, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry warned about the rising tide of antisemitism, with annual incidents now five times what they were prior to the October 7 massacres. These have included arson attacks on synagogues, preschools, and other Jewish institutions. Jewish homes and cars have been vandalized with antisemitic messages.

The response by the Australian government has been to accommodate the anti-Israel mob while failing to protect Jewish communities. . . . The Hanukkah event where the massacre occurred was an annual tradition run by the Jewish organization Chabad that brings together Sydney’s Jewish community. Given the rise of antisemitism in Australia, one would think there would be a large police presence on hand, prepared to respond immediately to any threat. Instead, witnesses reported that police “froze.”

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

A funny thing happens when government pressure is removed: Ford Pays the Price for Electric Vehicle Investments

On a life of the mind: Norman Podhoretz, R.I.P.

You made your point, China. Now let him go: Jimmy Lai’s Sham Conviction in Hong Kong

Republicans need a plan: A Health Care Opportunity for Republicans

ARTICLES

Jim Geraghty: Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong

Jeffrey Blehar: Donald Trump’s Emotional Incontinence Is Increasing with Time

James Lynch: D.C. Police Chief Pressured Staff into Manipulating Crime Data to Mislead Public, House Report Finds

James Lynch: White House Does Damage Control After Susie Wiles Criticizes Trump, Top Officials in Candid Interviews

Audrey Fahlberg: Trump Is Used to Bending Republicans to His Will. Did He Meet His Match in Indiana?

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Hope in the Face of Antisemitism

Mark Grabowski: In Europe, Freedom of the Press Is an Illusion

Eva Terry: The True Toll of Conspiracy Theories

Kamden Mulder: Pro-Democracy Hong Kong Media Mogul Jimmy Lai Found Guilty in National Security Trial

Tim Chapman: What a Bodega Taught the Socialist

Abigail Anthony: No Heroes in the Oklahoma Grading Controversy

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Brian Allen gets into the holiday spirit: A Wild West Christmas, Courtesy of Frederic Remington and Sid Richardson

Armond White, on a Spike/Denzel joint: Spike Lee’s Affordability Thriller

Jeffrey Blehar, with a tribute: Rob Reiner, Narrator of My Childhood

FROM THE NEW, FEBRUARY 2026 ISSUE OF NR

Jeffrey Blehar: Is Trump a Lame Duck?

Abigail Anthony: The U.K. Is in Peril

Vahaken Mouradian: Friday Night Fights

Mark Antonio Wright: What Ukraine Means for Americans

Jonathan Leaf: The Polyamory Delusion

Jack Crowe: The Resurrection of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Craig Young: A Valentine to America’s Sweetheart City

Bryan Garner: Buckley’s Debt to H. L. Mencken

EXCERPTS UNDER THE TREE

President Trump's antics are not just beneath the dignity of his office; they're beneath the dignity of that kid you knew in middle school who liked to shoot wads of paper out of a straw. The shticky conduct this week can't, with a straight face, be defended. First, the post about Rob Reiner’s murder, a dashed-off burn so callous, so bottomless in its spite, that it stuck out even on Truth Social. Then, newly installed plaques at the White House, essentially engraved tweets trolling Trump's predecessors. This man is not well. Here's Jeff Blehar:

Yes, Trump’s brand new Hall of Presidents just got updated this week with a brand new set of explanatory plaques! White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt helpfully clarifies: “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”

That much is certainly obvious. Have you ever wondered what the correct view of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential legacy was? Or JFK’s? Trump has now had his personal takes on them all — complete with engraved typos — helpfully memorialized on the White House wall for posterity (and visitors) to assess. And naturally, Trump has far more to say about his two recent rivals than any other president; their plaques are the transparent reason for the entire exercise.

Needless to say, they read as unmediated rants. (Biden’s plaque opens with this neutral description: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History.”) I think my point can be illustrated simply by reproducing the plaque underneath Barack Obama’s portrait. I want to stress that this represents the exact wording and punctuation of the two (!) plaques. President Trump just used taxpayer money to have this engraved:
Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History. As President, he passed the highly ineffictive “Unaffordable” Care Act, resulting in his party losing control of both Houses of Congress, and the Election of the largest House Republican majority since 1946. He presided over a stagnant Economy, approved the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, and signed the one-sided Paris Climate Accords, both of which were later terminated by President Donald J. Trump.
Under Obama, the ISIS Caliphate spread across the Middle East, Libya collapsed into chaos, and Russia invaded the Crimea, in Ukraine. He crippled small businesses with crushing regulation and environmental red tape, devastated American coal miners, and weaponized the IRS and Federal bureaucracies against his political opponents. Obama also spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History. His handpicked successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would then lose the Presidency to Donald J. Trump.
My first observation is that maybe plaques should have a 240 character limit, like most X accounts. My second observation is that this is probably the first time since the Roman Empire that a leader’s text message to a staffer has been engraved verbatim on the wall of a public building. What is there to say about Trump’s unmistakable grammar and adventurously pseudo-German penchant for capitalizing nouns, other than that man is in desperate need of an editor?

Who does Trump think this trolling pleases? What voters currently wavering from their support for Trump, or the Republican Party in the midterms, will see this news story and think “What a zinger! I’m back on the bandwagon”?

From NR’s editorial on Norman Podhoretz:

Born, as he described in Making It, in a Jewish slum in Brooklyn, Norman Podhoretz blazed through Columbia and Cambridge, where he impressed first Lionel Trilling then F. R. Leavis (talk about the anxiety of influence), then became editor of Commentary magazine at age 30. When he took the reins, Commentary was a learned, sedate monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, committed to postwar, liberal anti-communism. A friend of Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman, Podhoretz initially nudged it in a countercultural direction. But then he swung right.

How they hated him for it — they being the unpersuaded members of the New York family of intellectuals, almost all Jewish, all to one degree or another on the left. Podhoretz hoped to swing them with him, and he succeeded with many. But the larger remainder remained, and never ever forgave him. Apply the rhetorical Geiger counter to reviews of his late books in mainstream publications. The animus pushes the needle out of the dial.

Podhoretz gave as good as he got. He was a fighter. One of his late books was devoted to friends he had broken with, titled Ex-Friends (the cover displayed a huge red X). The discarded included Mailer, Columbia contemporary Allen Ginsberg, and Lillian Hellman.

He fought zealously because the stakes were high. He agreed that liberals pursued social policies that had proven to be feckless, though that was an insight more central to his comrades in defection, Irving Kristol and (to a lesser degree) Daniel Bell. What animated Podhoretz most was the threat to the United States and to Israel posed by the Soviet Union, and by the left here and abroad generally. It was to combat this threat that he ghost-wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s speech condemning the U.N.’s resolution labeling Zionism as racism. It was to combat this that Commentary under his leadership published hawks like Jeane Kirkpatrick.

ICYMI, Deseret News reporter Eva Terry, who witnessed Charlie Kirk’s assassination, published a first-hand account on the effect and viral spread of conspiracy theories:

Since Kirk’s death on September 10, there has been a steadily growing, insatiable thirst for conspiracy — and it is not without consequence.

The conspiracies germinated immediately following the shooting. In [Tyler] Robinson’s hometown, three days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I interviewed a mother of two young sons. In earnest, she told me it was not Robinson who’d killed Kirk; it was a TPUSA donor with grievances. In our brief conversation, she referenced a plane that took off from the Provo Airport around the time of the shooting and added that she’d seen the video of him being shot, and the bullet path defied logic. “We live in a world where there’s a lot of stuff going on with the government, and I think we just need to take our precautions and do our due diligence as citizens, not jump to conclusions as far as damning him and convicting [Robinson],” the woman told me.

About a week later, outside UVU’s student- and community-made vigil, I spoke with a man who told me he’d driven down from Washington State that morning to check out the grounds for himself. As an ex-military guy, he didn’t think Robinson was the culprit either. An inexperienced kid wouldn’t be capable of taking apart the gun that quickly, and his escape route didn’t make sense, he told me. I’m not sure what he discovered when I pointed him in the direction of the amphitheater, but I hope it was worth the twelve-hour drive.

Enter Candace Owens.

I have neither the word count nor the will to explain the accusations Owens makes across her 40-plus episodes on Charlie’s murder. It suffices to say that in her mind, TPUSA is guilty, his wife Erika is guilty, Jews are guilty, the FBI is guilty, Mormons are guilty, France is guilty, and Egypt is guilty. They’re all in on it; they’re lying to you, she says.

Guilty of what? We’re not sure. And guilty why? That, too, we don’t know. . . .

Though conspiracy theories are nothing new, they are newly mainstreamed. As journalist Andy Ngo recently reasoned, self-styled journalists like Candace Owens who peddle conspiracy theories as hoaxes and innuendo are not harmless. “News” with no guidelines, no accountability, and no guardrails reduces a situation to fiction.

This is not to suggest the traditional press is faultless. The original sin of journalism is that it profits from tragedy, mayhem, and dirty laundry. But in exchange, it offers the simple reward of knowing what’s going on. What happened? Who did it? Why?

But Owens and those pushing conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk’s death are counterfeiting knowledge, jeopardizing the judicial process and skewing public perception.

CODA

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year -- I’m getting all three of those in because I’ll be taking off next week. The Weekend Jolt, as a result, will do that rare thing and go dark next weekend, back and refreshed for 2026.

The news has been gloomier than usual lately. May the New Year bring less violence, more sanity, more hope.

So, on a positive note: We’ll rewind to the ’90s, what Dan McLaughlin accurately called the last golden age of pop-rock bands. Those of us who listened nonstop to FM radio back then didn’t realize how spoiled for choice we were with catchy music that would stay with us for life. That’s my wind-up for saying that a friend handed me a Wallflowers record the other day, unloosing all manner of nostalgia. Ease into the holiday week with “Three Marlenas.” It might take you back.