The media is in the simplification business. We try to simplify reality.

In a world that is complex and cruel and fast-moving, our preferred question often is: “Why did it happen?”

KINSELLA: Attacks on Jews show antisemitism exploding globally Back to video

Assigning motive following newsworthy events – terrible, horrific events – is what we usually focus on first.

A madman gets in his pickup, armed with a gun, with about $2,000 worth of explosives loaded in the back. And then he drives through the doors of Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan – intent on killing hundreds of Jewish kids.

The terrorist is killed before he can kill anyone else.

Then the question is inevitably heard: why did it happen?

Some of the answers given by some media, and some experts and politicians, are appalling – or offer questions that already contain the answer. The mayor of nearby Dearborn, Mich., for instance, issues a statement declaring that the terrorist “lost several members of his own family … in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon.”

Does that imply the attack was justified, somehow?

A CTV headline: “Investigators working to determine exact reason for attack at Michigan synagogue.”

A CBS News veteran with a similarly unaware report: the terrorist “had become reclusive,” she said. “He didn’t show up to work after his family was killed in airstrikes in Lebanon.”

Would it not be useful to note “his family” were members of Hezbollah?

A New York Times headline: “Authorities are investigating the attacker’s motive.”

Motive was antisemitism

No, in fact. We know the motive: it was antisemitism. The oldest, most-durable hatred; the one that never dies. Antisemitism, as it manifested itself just this week at that synagogue in Michigan, or a synagogue in Norway, or at three synagogues in Toronto.

Ask Vlad Khaykin: he’s brilliant, and he’ll tell you. It’s antisemitism, full stop.

Khaykin comes from a family of scrappers and Holocaust survivors, who would famously oppose Jew hatred with their fists.

“Fighting antisemites,” he laughs, “is the family business.”

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of antisemitism to object to, in these dark days. Jews, Jewish community centres, schools and synagogues have been attacked all over the world in the dark days since Oct. 7, 2023

Firebombs, bullets, beatings. Murders, in Washington and Colorado and other places.

Khaykin, a senior executive at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the U.S., considers where all this hate is coming from.

“These things don’t just come from nowhere,” he says. “People don’t just get up one day and start murdering their neighbours. They have to be driven to that.”

It’s so stupid and evil and wrong, I tell him. Where does it come from?

State actors with an agenda exploit antisemitism

Says Khaykin, author of forthcoming study on the subject: “It isn’t just that people distrust those who are different from them.”

It’s much more than that, he says.

The antisemitism we are seeing everywhere, he says, “is being exploited by state actors with a particular agenda. Realizing that is absolutely critical to any success that we can hope to have in this fight.”

Until all of us – Jews and non-Jews alike – accept that antisemitism is exploding globally because it’s being amplified by Iran, China, Russia, Qatar and their proxies in Hamas et al., we’ll lose the fight, he says.

“And unless and until we realize that, and change our approach, we can’t expect any success in this war. I really believe that.”

The scale of the state-driven Jew hatred is now immense, Khaykin says. But it manifests itself in surreal ways.

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He cites the case of rapper Kanye West.

“Kanye West has become a very powerful cultural (promoter) for antisemitism,” he says. “But Kanye West has more online followers than there are Jews existing in the world. That, I think, shows just how daunting the information war is…If every single Jew on the planet posted a pro-Jewish message, it would not even qualify as a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers on the other side.”

Iran, Qatar and the rest are aiding and abetting this tidal wave of hate, Khaykin says.

“On the other side, you have state-level actors like Russia, Iran, Qatar, etcetera, with state-level-sized budgets, state-level-sized armies of personnel whose job it is all day, every day, to go to work, to try to sow division, polarization, antisemitism, extremism. To incite people to radicalism and violence. That’s their job. That’s all they do all day, every day.”

And, as Vlad Khaykin notes, we need to wake up to magnitude of what we’re up against. Otherwise, there will be more synagogues attacked, he says, in places like in Michigan and Toronto. There will be more bloodshed: that’s the present reality.

“They’re not simply trying to get people to believe or disbelieve certain facts or falsehoods,” he concludes. “They’re trying to reshape the way people interpret reality.”

– Kinsella is the author of the forthcoming book The Hidden Hand, from Penguin Random House

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