Silence is not an option: How Hamas’s lies against Israel fuel terrorism against Jews - opinion

Terrorists worldwide are being inflamed by Hamas’s fabricated lies; we must call on our elected officials and community leaders to condemn those who blame Israel for defending themselves

Oleg Ivanov | The Jerusalem Post | June 10, 2025

Emergency summit held in Boulder, Colorado after the antisemitic attack towards Run for Their Lives group.

Jews around the world are under assault, from Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, to Paris, Montreal, Chile, Australia, Israel, and elsewhere.

The June 1 terrorist attack against the Run for Their Lives walk in Boulder targeted Jews and others peacefully walking to raise awareness about the remaining 58 hostages, both dead and alive, held in deadly conditions by Hamas in Gaza.

This was a premeditated attack against an apolitical global organization that, since its founding, has seen its 230 chapters march every Sunday without any violent incidents until Sunday, June 1. Run For Their Lives was founded following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The walks are peaceful and nonpolitical and are dedicated to supporting the hostages.

This act of terrorism came less than two weeks after another premeditated act of antisemitic violence on American soil, when two diplomats from the Israeli Embassy, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were murdered on May 21, 2025, at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.

The couple had been attending an event centered on fostering interfaith humanitarian diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

A large part of the impetus behind Hamas’s invasion was to disrupt growing peace efforts between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors, as embodied in the Abraham Accords, which have brought hope to a region too long enmeshed in sectarian violence.

Many of the Israeli Jews and Muslims murdered, maimed, tortured, and/or kidnapped on October 7 lived on the Gaza border and were deeply involved in local peace efforts, as were Milgrim and Lischinsky.

It seems no coincidence that the recent antisemitic attacks, launched against Jews struggling to bring peaceful solutions to the war in Gaza, were accompanied by assailants shouting “Free Palestine.”

Jewish groups have long warned that this slogan is a dog whistle calling for the murder of Jews worldwide and for their ethnic cleansing from Israel.

Given that this genocidal slogan – along with its sister chants of “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” – have been heard on college campuses and at protests throughout America, it is unfortunately unsurprising that those screaming these words are now putting them into action with guns and Molotov cocktails.

For years, antisemitic lies have infiltrated and entrenched themselves into our institutions of higher learning, where they are spread under the politically acceptable language of anti-Zionism, using pseudo-philosophical jargon within the framework of innocuous-sounding disciplines like “critical theory” and “liberated ethnic studies.”

This ideology has made the jump from academic settings to our local streets and city councils, where it is now wreaking similar havoc.

Terrorists worldwide are also being inflamed by Hamas’s fabricated lies about the alleged famine in Gaza and the accusations of IDF attacks on Gazans receiving aid, spread by its enablers at the United Nations and amplified on social media and even by many media outlets.

The reality is that Hamas has attacked and murdered Gazans receiving Western aid (with IDF support), while the terror group itself hoards aid to better convince ill-informed observers of their blood libels against Israel.

The spread of lies and misinformation

Many believe that such misinformation, spreading like wildfire, has created a cultural ecosystem that led to a young couple being murdered in our capital and to another eight civilians (including a Holocaust survivor) being burned by a Molotov cocktail-throwing terrorist in Boulder.

There is good reason to believe that these tragedies could have been avoided if Hamas’s lies had not been uncritically published and consumed by so many, or if the reality on the ground in Gaza had been reported with greater accuracy.

Democracy has to be an active endeavor, not merely a spectator sport.

Those interested in maintaining an open society that values civil dialogue practiced in safety, without fear of violence, have to denounce the support for homicidal terrorism embodied in the “Free Palestine” movement, whose tactic is violence and whose goal is the erasure of such free and open discourse.

It is time for our political leaders to step up and call this international conflagration by its name: the targeting of Jewish people under the spurious fig leaf of anti-Zionism, which threatens all of our safety and the civic values that we all hold dear.

We must join together to call on our elected officials and community leaders to condemn those who blame Israel for defending themselves against the crimes committed by Hamas and its allies against Jews and others on October 7 and since.

Silence is not an option, because what we are seeing now is the push to globalize the violent “intifada.” If we don’t put an end to it together, its flames will only continue to spread.

Read the full article here.