“Antisemitism” in Cognitive Warfare: A Warning for America

Question: “Who is the cause of all the troubles in the world?” 

Answer: “The Jews and the bicycle riders.”

Question: “Why the bicycle riders?”

Answer: “Why the Jews?”

A Lethal Obsession

Moses and his recently liberated Hebrews asked themselves the same question when, on their way to Mount Sinai, the satanic Amalek and his nomadic horde attacked them for no apparent reason. His defeat did not deter him and his allegorical descendants from repeated assaults “throughout the generations” (Exodus 17:14). Dispensing with theological references, the influential British historian Paul Johnson called antisemitism simply a disease. So did his compatriot Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who declared in 2016: “the appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease,” indeed a serious “early warning sign of collective breakdown.” His diagnosis: antisemitism is “a form of cognitive failure, and it happens when groups feel that their world is spinning out of control.” 

Collective breakdowns, however, hardly ever happen without a militant vanguard convinced, self-deluded, or cynical enough to presume (or at least convince others) that it can eradicate societal ailments. Modern-day Amalekites are savvy wordsmiths. State the learned authors of The Jew-Hatred Mindset: A Scriptural Guide, just published by the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America: “In each generation, antisemites delude themselves and others into believing that their positions are reasonable, even meritorious” because they fall victim to shrewd rhetoric. “In truth, they work with what Hitler called the ‘Big Lie’ — an assertion so fantastically at odds with reality that people, paradoxically, take it seriously.”

How does a lie become Big? By bypassing empirical evidence, employing broad-brush, quasi-religious generalizations. Ambiguity breeds obfuscation. Linguistic subterfuge blends facts and values, with euphemisms and pejoratives coating half-truths with a toxic veneer. Demagogues exploit this group pathology, mingling scraps of truth with lies, concocting a sinister rhetorical cancer of which antisemitism is a prime example. Readily metastasized through the spiritual void across the ideological spectrum, the social organism spins out of control. SOS.

Life-threatening organ failure requires intensive care. But when that organ is the human mind, most diagnostic instruments fail unless both patient and healer first recognize the imminent danger to both and what it means. For starters, the word “antisemitism” refers not only to hatred of Jews as such but of what they represent. As a tool for hubristic elites bent on radical upheaval, propaganda is a prelude to monophony.

“Antisemitism” in Modern Cognitive Warfare 

Hating a “mentality” seems less crass than hating actual Jews — who may inconveniently turn out to be innocent of charges against them — and sounds more sophisticated. “Anti-Semitism” turned out to be just the ticket.

It began with “Semitic,” an innocuous enough term, coined in 1781 by the German scholar August Ludwig von Schlözer to refer to Middle Eastern languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. In contrast, semitism is meaningless, a fact cleverly concealed within the conveniently unhyphenated “antisemitism.” Converting a linguist’s label into an ideology—an ism—a pseudo-religious, comprehensive system of explanation and justification that is logically immune to refutation was brilliant. This seemingly ordinary new word, therefore, became one of the most harmful strands of the modern mind-virus.  

Antisemitismus, wrote the premier scholar of antisemitism Robert S. Wistrich, was “part of an increasingly prevalent ‘critique of laissez-faire capitalist society,’” and as such, “reflected a new version of Jew-bashing;” it thus “had its origins on the German left.” Though Karl Marx neither used the term nor coined it, that dubious honor belonging to the atheist William Marr (1819-1904), he articulated its message: “What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist,” he wrote in On the Jewish Question (1844). By thus adding a materialist underpinning to Bruno Bauer’s theological Judeophobia, the latter welcomed it with alacrity. For as Marx biographer Franz Mehring later noted, Bauer “needed a scapegoat against which he could deflect the capitalist masses and he found it in the Jews.” 

Once thus weaponized, this anti-liberal rhetoric/ideology later morphed into a Manichean dialectic which pitted good against evil. History recycled, Jews were crucified first.  Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered it, but his Minister of Propaganda showed how to sell it. 

Rewind a full century before the horrific Tisha B’av pogrom of October 7, 2023. Joseph Goebbels writes in his diary: “I think about the Jewish Question very often. The problem of race is, after all, the deepest and most mysterious thing that penetrates into public life today. … There’s something very destructive in its essence, especially in the spirit.” A few weeks later, he adds: “Jewry is the poison that kills the ethnic body of Europe.” 

Reading Henry Ford’s recently translated The International Jew, which rehashed a scurrilous antisemitic rant titled Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purportedly proves how Jewish “Elders” conspire to destroy the world, he is convinced that “[w]e live in a century of expiring liberalism and rising socialism,”  Despite recognizing it as a crude forgery, Goebbels immediately grasps its ideal use for propaganda. When disseminated even by an American of Ford’s gargantuan stature, it is obviously a perfectly timed weapon.

On June 18, 1924, Goebbels waxes neo-Marxist: 

Money and the Jew: Siamese twins. If one kills one of them, then the other must die too. Kill the spirit of Mammonism in you. Then the Jew will also have to die. Money and the Jew: Siamese twins. If one kills one of them, then the other must die too. Kill the spirit of Mammonism in you. Then the Jew will also have to die.

Two decades later, on January 21, 1945, aware the war had been lost, Goebbels lashes out one last time, brazenly unmasking the sinister blueprint of his strategy in its full demonic simplicity. Implicitly alluding to the Big Lie of the Protocols, he persists in accusing “International Jewry” of standing “behind all the unnatural forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and keep humanity in the dark. It is, so to speak, the mortar that holds the enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class, ideology, and interests.”

It is the same lie that unites anti-liberals using various ideological narratives—Nazi, Soviet, and other ideocracies, notably Islamist jihadists—both Shia and Sunni. Each had its own Orwellian language, custom-built to resonate with cultural prejudices. In this increasingly dangerous world, as nuclear and cyber weapons become exponentially more lethal to human survival, it would be wise not to forget the cognitive component of war. And antisemitism has served as the most effective “catalytic agent” for totalitarian politics by any other name. 

Fighting Cognitive Warfare Like a Real War

It had been the philosopher Hannah Arendt who argued, as early as 1951, that The Origin of Totalitarianism lay in antisemitism. Having escaped her native Germany just before the Holocaust, landing in the U.S. in 1941, Arendt declared that “far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist,” totalitarian leaders “use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality” evaporates altogether. The reason is simply that “[a]ntisemitic slogans proved the most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government.” 

It is no accident that Islamists have made common cause with self-described neo-Nazis sporting tattooed swastikas, “Greens,” and other anti-American radicals, who burn both American and Israeli flags, shooting inside and near synagogues indiscriminately, Jews and non-Jews alike. The spectacularly successful military operation started on February 28, attacking Iran, communist China’s most dangerous ally and Russia’s partner, by the United States in stunning synchrony with Israel, may signal the demise of that terrorist regime, but not its ideology. It may even seem to have confirmed Ayatollah Khomeini’s narrative of “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” conspiring together. 

Results are in: on March 3, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism reported that the joint operation “triggered an immediate online surge of antisemitic, anti-Zionist and conspiratorial commentary that spanned the ideological spectrum.”

Like all cancers, the cognitive strand metastasizes long before it becomes unstoppable. Ultimately, it kills the host. How much the American people have already been turned against themselves by institutions like the academy and the media remains unknown. Infected over the decades by strategically positioned, well-funded elite leaders—sometimes unaware that they are being manipulated—it’s baffling, given that the evidence has long been available. Its growing ubiquity has rendered evil “banal” once again, with complacency gradually displacing moral horror.  

Consider the rise of antisemitism and anti-Americanism immediately after October 7, 2023, when people worldwide watched in horror footage of barbaric massacres—mostly of young people, babies, pregnant women, and elderly—proudly recorded by Hamas butchers themselves on their phones. Across the globe, antisemitic attacks were launched with remarkable precision, coordination, and rage. Despite graphic evidence of unfathomable brutality—psychopaths proudly taking selfies while raping, torturing, and burning innocent civilians—it was the victims who were blamed for "committing genocide." Lies do not get much bigger than that.

This inversion of values would not have occurred if the war against Judentum, the “spirit” of Judaism, also known as the Abrahamic values of liberal democratic nations, had not been fought across the globe, especially in America, for a very long time. Its magnitude became increasingly clear in the ensuing explosion of antisemitism on American campuses and the radical, antisemitic Democratic Socialists of America, whose growing influence on the Democratic Party is no less alarming than the rise of self-described patriots who claim to oppose them while in reality capitalizing on similarly mindless conspiracy theories. It is only too slowly dawning on otherwise well-informed people how much they have missed for too long.

Film director Wendy Sachs and her colleagues, for example, learned a few hard facts while working on a documentary titled “October 8,” released in early March, 2025. That the ubiquitous and well-organized Students for Justice in Palestine, which led the campus violence and propaganda, is funded by terror organizations, they already knew. But not that

Hamas had effectively acted as a PR company, strategizing how to accomplish just that. In 1993, 25 Hamas leaders met at a Marriott hotel near the Philadelphia International Airport. The FBI wiretapped the room, recording every word they said. There, they concocted a plan to infiltrate American campuses and the media hotel in Philadelphia. They determined that the most effective approach was to use keywords in their propaganda that would resonate with their audience, including “apartheid” and “oppression.”

“That was mind-blowing to me and everyone else on our team,” said Sachs. “I had some sort of foundational knowledge, but I had no idea how sophisticated they are—how they are really being financed from abroad, how they are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, to Hamas and terror organizations—and you can really trace it back to Iran.” Her movie had been financed entirely by Jewish philanthropists who, by no means, constituted a majority.

America must adopt not only a military plan, however indispensable, but a genuine grand strategy that is truly interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, public and private, realistic, and amenable to constant revision based on evidence. Fortunately, Congress seems to have finally realized that “there is an urgent need for a coherent understanding of and investment in cognitive warfare.” It has therefore requested the Pentagon to provide “a report on cognitive warfare and narrative intelligence” by March 31, 2026. 

I have a suggestion: study how antisemitic narratives became weaponized against Western civilization and specifically its most powerful leader. The Hebrew nation, within and beyond Israel, will undoubtedly survive — it always does.

But will America?

Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She is the author of An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left.