New antisemitism is Islamophobia’s new apparatus

As a Muslim scholar of Islamophobia, I know how hate can be intensified when my identity as a Muslim is only seen as associated with a monstrous entity.  Despite the West’s well-documented role in the conditions that produced ISIS, ISIS appropriated Islam as a political identity and a vehicle for violence, is making Muslims in the West less safe. The 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack, where a far-right terrorist shot and murdered 53 Muslim worshippers, marked the catastrophic culmination of this Islamophobic climate in the West.

 Israel is reproducing a similar environment for Jews. While carrying out a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, Israel simultaneously asserts itself as the custodian of Judaism and the representative of Jews everywhere. In doing so, it collapses a diverse global faith community into members of this violent settler-colonial project.

 Both ISIS and Israel collapse faith into violent political projects. ISIS fused Islam with terrorism; Israel fuses Judaism with Zionism, insisting that its actions, no matter how criminal, are undertaken in the name of Jewish survival and safety. Both render their entire faith communities symbolically implicated in the violence carried out in their name.

 Just as ISIS made Muslims less safe, Israel is making Jews less safe.

 But Israel is not ISIS

 The difference between Israel and ISIS reflects a potent manifestation of Islamophobia within the Western political and moral psyche. One group’s ideological violence is designated as terrorism and treated as an existential threat, while the other group’s violence, even genocide, is accepted as self-defence and even normalised, protected, and morally laundered through international and media narratives. One group’s faith is securitised as inherently fundamentalist, the other group’s faith – once associated with Zionism and Western geopolitical interests – is embraced, insulated from scrutiny and politically safeguarded even as its leaders cite scripture to justify the killing of women, children, and civilians. Whereas ISIS was confronted as a threat to global order, Israel is insulated by Western power and incorporated into its moral architecture.

 Even the impact of people acclaimed to be connected to these violent political projects is starkly different. Muslims were subjected to heightened surveillance and suspicion, with a continuous demand to condemn violence and an ideology that they didn’t commit nor endorse. In contrast, Zionist Jewish groups are never expected to condemn the internationally abhorred genocide enacted under the banner of their faith. In fact, Zionist actors can publicly celebrate the destruction of Palestinian and Muslim life with no fear of sanction. To add to that, opposition to Israel’s political ideology or military violence is now reclassified as antisemitism, as new antisemitism.

 Zionism and the violence enacted under its banner enjoy a level of impunity unparalleled in contemporary global politics.

 It is within this racial hierarchy of accountability and empathy that new antisemitism is conceived.

 This racialised hierarchy, in whose name violence is condemned, and who’s dismissed or excused, is Islamophobic to its core. Rather than holding Israel accountable for its crimes the same way the world rejected ISIS’s ideology of violence, Western states and institutions increasingly deploy this rebranded conception of antisemitism as a tool of governance instrumentalised to preserve Western geopolitical interests and sustain a global order in which some forms of violence are condemned, while others are rendered invisible, permissible, or even virtuous, all under the guise of protecting Jewish safety. 

 Within this hierarchy, antisemitism is no longer a form of racism against Jews. It is a new tool in the Islamophobia apparatus that normalises and rationalises Muslims’ deaths, albeit this tool works to silence Muslims’ suffering and grievances through the manoeuvre of accusations that label outrage at genocide as racism, dissent as extremism, and solidarity as criminality.

 New antisemitism: A zero-sum game

 Australia offers the latest example of how the new antisemitism conception in the West has been repurposed as Islamophobia’s latest apparatus, deploying Israel’s zero-sum logic of existence and empathy. Within this framework, Jewish safety is constructed as achievable only through the suppression of Palestinian existence, political expression, and solidarity.

 Following Australia’s mass mobilisation for Gaza and its recognition of Palestine, Benyamin Netanyahu denounced Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews.” After the Bondi attack, Netanyahu again intervened, claiming that Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state had “poured fuel on the antisemitic fire”. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, grimly familiar Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian unsubstantiated accusations circulated among far-right and pro-Israel actors. These claims, entirely unsubstantiated, exploited a moment of collective shock to forge causal links between pro-Palestine protests and antisemitism. The political function of this narrative is clear: to pressure the Australian government into fast-tracking the adoption of the antisemitism Special Envoy’s,  Jillian Segal, heavily criticised and draconian recommendations, which aim to silence criticism of Israel under the guise of combating antisemitism. Segal drew an explicit connection between the Bondi Attack and the massive pro-Palestine protest at Sydney Harbour Bridge earlier, stating:

 “We need to stop with the hate, stop with the chants”

 “Stop with the waving of terrorist flags, because it progresses just as we saw the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and now Bondi Beach, each a progression and hateful words leading to where we are today.”At the core of this “new antisemitism” narrative lies a zero-sum logic that frames Jewish safety as fundamentally incompatible with Palestinian existence, resistance, and demands for justice. Palestinian visibility and political mobilisation are recoded as Jewish endangerment and antisemitism, a framing that is now increasingly reproduced in mainstream political discourse. This is the zero-sum logic contemporary politicians invoke when speaking about antisemitism and hate. Under the banner of protecting Jews, this zero-sum framework is being institutionalised through policy. Segal’s recommendations would push Australia to join the forty-three other countries that have already adopted and institutionalised the IHRA definition to shut down and criminalise anti-Zionist voices. Leading the institutionalisation of the IHRA are the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany. A substantial body of scholarship and journalism has documented how antisemitism has been weaponised across these contexts to justify police crackdowns, legal restrictions, discrimination, and excessive force against peaceful protesters. Within this paradigm, university encampments and mass demonstrations opposing genocide are labelled antisemitic. Calls to end apartheid, mass killings, and the incarceration of children, journalists, medics, and civilians are penalised as hatred of Jews. Even the visible expression of Palestinian identity, keffiyehs, flags, chants, and collective mourning, is recoded as antisemitism.

 This dynamic is not incidental; it reflects a broader settler-colonial logic. Settler-colonial projects sustain themselves by constructing a narrative of endangered safety, allegedly threatened by the mere existence of the Indigenous population they seek to eliminate. The same population it seeks to eradicate. After all, the moral domination of a settler-colonial state involves not only the physical expulsion or genocide of natives, but also the obliteration of their culture and their right to speak up against oppression. Within this framework, Palestinian existence itself becomes incompatible with Israel’s settler-colonial project. Consequently, just as the annihilation of Palestinians is framed as synonymous with Israeli security, the control and disciplining of opposition to that annihilation is reframed as the fight against “antisemitism.”

 Muslims are the most impacted

 Disguised as Jewish protection, new antisemitism functions as a contemporary form of racism: Islamophobia redeployed to discipline and shut down Muslim political expression.

 Once institutionalised through political rhetoric, media amplification, and policy instruments, it translates into tangible forms of surveillance, silencing, and punishment.  Those most immediately impacted are communities who are already disproportionately racialised and securitised because of Islamophobia; Muslims and Arabs in the West who are inherently pro-Palestinian. Precisely the communities Israel is keen to silence, criminalise and eradicate to ensure its colonial project resumes uninterrupted. Indeed, Israel and its Zionist allies are well-known core tenets in the Islamophobia industry, from the moment of inception of the “Islamic Terrorism” concept in Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute conferences of 1979 and 1984, to embedding it in US foreign policies and domestic antiterrorism legislation throughout the past 25+ years, up until recently as Isreal forge new alliances with Europe and US far-right groups under the banner of defending “Judeo-Christian civilisation” in their fight against “political Islam”. This is why, within this new antisemitism conception, support for Palestine is tarnished as support for “Hamas”, “Islamic terrorism”, “Jihadism” and the like. The Islamophobic trope of associating Muslims with terrorism is repurposed to undermine the calls for Palestinian liberation or criticism of Israel. This aligns seamlessly with Israel’s current propaganda strategy: reviving fear of “radical Islam” and “jihadism” in an effort to repair the collapse of its moral legitimacy following the world slowly getting sober of its Hasbara machinery.

 In Australia, the consequences were swift. Within twenty-four hours of the Bondi attack, the Islamic Council of Victoria ICV reported a surge in abusive and threatening calls and messages, forcing it to disable public comments across its platforms. Similarly, the Islamophobia register documented a sharp increase in incidents, with its social media channels flooded with accusations of antisemitism and overtly abusive rhetoric.

 Far from preventing harm, this manoeuvre entrenches the very conditions under which both antisemitism and Islamophobia are reproduced, while shielding a genocidal state from accountability.

 The new antisemitism sustains a global political environment in which opposition to state violence is criminalised and solidarity with its Muslim victims is delegitimised. New antisemitism provides the cover for further violence against Israel’s main victims, Muslims and Palestinians.

 

Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251219-new-antisemitism-is-islamophobias-new-apparatus/