‘Truth Is Not the Norm’: US Antisemitism Envoy Says Social Media, Poor Education Fueling Antisemitism

Washington, DC — Combating rising antisemitism in contemporary America requires educating youth and denouncing racism and hatred at the highest levels of government, Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the US special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism, said on Thursday during a talk at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.

Hosted by Hudson senior fellow Michael Doran, the event, titled “Confronting Antisemitism,” went over the Trump administration’s management of the antisemitism crisis in the US. Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, antisemitic incidents and hate crimes surged to record levels across the Western world, created an overtly hostile environment for Jewish communities not seen in decades.

Kaploun, who is a trained rabbi as well as the descendant of rabbis, said one driver of antisemitism today is the proliferation of disinformation on social media. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, social media has modernized the manufacturing and distribution of political propaganda by reducing complex subjects to “memes” — some involving humor or contemporary cultural references which appeal to the sensibilities of the youth. It is the cheapest and most effective weapon in the arsenal of pro-Hamas activists and their fellow travelers in neo-Nazi and far-left circles.

From 2013 to 2024, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine, pro-Hamas faculty groups, and others posted over 76,000 posts on social media which were analyzed by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, Bloomington. Over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.

“We’re a different society than we were 30, 40, or 50 years ago,” Kaploun explained, discussing the outsized role social media has played as a distributor of antisemitism. “The amount of information that is disseminated literally with the press of a button … you used to be able to work and verify and research something.”

He added, “So, for example, The New York Times puts out a picture and they say this is, you know, famine, a malnutritioned child. There’s something wrong with that when it’s a fake picture or the facts aren’t verified. So, you have 50 million views for arguments sake, but the apology will only get 100,000 views. That level of factual misconduct, for lack of a better term, is prevalent today, and that’s part of the increase. You don’t have that same level of people being responsible for what they’re saying … truth is not the norm.”

Kaploun went on to critique US public education for failing to teach students basic concepts while neglecting to foster national pride.

“The pride of being an American is missing,” he continued. “Because of that, it lends itself to people not being able to take on people spewing these truths.”

A quarter way through the event, Kaploun was disrupted by a pair of anti-Zionist hecklers who, bellowing from the back of the room, charged that he and Jews spread hate while committing genocide. Both were escorted from the venue and out of the building without further incident.

The Hudson Institute — a think tank comprising a distinguished roster of experts which includes Walter Russell Mead, Rebeccah Heinrichs, and Bill Drexel — has emerged as a leading voice denouncing the rise of antisemitism and other racial backsliding in the US. While being primarily focused on foreign policy, Hudson has identified the link between currents in US domestic politics and the conducting of its international affairs, noting that the spread of harmful ideas at home hinders America’s performance on the world stage while advancing the interests of its enemies.

“All forms of bigotry are un-American,” Doran said during Thursday’s event, responding to a comment by Kaploun. “But antisemitism is anti-American. There’s a reason our adversaries our pushing it all around the world.”

Recent incidents in the US indicate that America’s enemies are gaining ground with American youth, as individuals under 30 were the perpetrators in several recent high-profile antisemitic incidents. Meanwhile, the most prominent neo-Nazi in the US today, Nicholas Fuentes, is just 27 years old.

In January, court documents filed by the FBI revealed that Stephen Pittman, 19, confessed to starting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, telling US federal investigators that he did so over its “Jewish ties.” Not a month later, a sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami, Kaylee Mahony, verbally attacked a Jewish student group in a tirade which accused rabbis of “eating babies.”

In September, a conservative student magazine at Harvard University published an opinion piece which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.

Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”

Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own” in response to concerns over large-scale migration of Muslims into Europe.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.