Antisemitism is the real crisis the West keeps ignoring

By Ryan Helfenbein, Op-ed contributor Saturday, March 28, 2026

What if the phobia the Western elites invented isn’t real, and the hatred they ignore is setting records? What is the difference between Islamophobia and antisemitism, and which is the biggest threat to the West? How should we think about this? Here’s the point.

Any argument should begin with simple definitions. We should always define our terms. The word phobia means an irrational fear. Islamophobia, by definition, means an irrational fear of Islam.

Today, there are many who would claim that Islamophobia poses the greatest threat to the West. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to do all that he can to eradicate Islamophobia from British society. Over 12,000 arrests have been made for online social media posts that were deemed as hate speech, yet grooming gangs, gang rape, and knifing attacks either go unreported or are unsolved crimes.

Islamophobia is an outright falsifiable claim in the West. The moment you can cite evidence, you are told the concern itself is the problem, which is exactly what happened to Tommy Robinson when he appeared on Piers Morgan. He was being accused of being Islamophobic when he raised concerns about rising Islam in British society. But that’s exactly how censorship works in the West.

Here is what the data actually shows. Since 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution, a movement operating under the banner of Jihadist Islam has produced over 66,000 documented terrorist attacks and nearly 250,000 deaths worldwide. What actually exists in the West today is not Islamophobia, it is Islamoapathy — a willful, cultivated indifference to a real and growing ideological threat.

And here is the bitter twist: While Western elites have been busy policing rational concerns about Islam, the documented, FBI-verified, record-setting hatred of Jewish people has metastasized across college campuses, across the media, and the political movements on both the right and the left. We are being told to fear a fiction, rather than looking evil straight in the eye and calling it out by name.

So how should we think about this?

First, antisemitism is the crisis the West is largely ignoring

Let’s call antisemitism what it really is: Judeophobia, an irrational obsessive scapegoating of Jewish people — a group that makes up 0.2% of the world’s population — for virtually every societal ill imaginable. And in 2025, it broke records. The FBI documented over 1900 anti-Jewish hate crimes, a record high — nearly 70% of all religion-based hate crimes in America. Anti-Muslim incidents total 228. Meanwhile, 83% of Jewish college students reported experiencing or witnessing antisemitism on their campuses since the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Many were emboldened by what they saw in the media and on social media, and it created a bandwagon effect.

Judeophobia is not a fringe problem. It is a mainstream crisis. It’s being normalized across the political spectrum, and more recently, it has been setting a wedge, threatening to divide the conservative right.

Second, the threat of Islam as a homegrown terror is real, it’s lethal, and it’s ideologically driven

Now, I want to be clear. This distinction matters. Islam is not nearly a religion. It’s not a people group. It is a political and militant ideology in which the promotion of Sharia Law goes beyond any mere religious category. It is a complete and total way of life — one that does not distinguish between mosque and state.

And that distinction matters enormously in a constitutional republic because the Constitution was codified for a Western, Christian, and largely Protestant people. Islam, by its own doctrinal design, is not an assimilating belief system. Now that is not a slur. It is a structural reality that honest people across the political spectrum are only now beginning to say out loud.

The numbers confirm what this ideology predicts. Since 1994, 140 Jihadist attacks or plots on U.S. soil have taken place. On New Year’s Day 2025, an ISIS-inspired attacker drove a vehicle into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, killing 14 people. It was the deadliest domestic terror attack since the Pulse Nightclub attack in 2016 that killed over 50 people.

In Europe, Europe Pol’s crime data recorded 24 Jihadist attacks in 2024, up from 14 the year prior. The Global Terrorism Index in 2025 named ISIS as the world’s deadliest terror organization, responsible for 1800 deaths in 2024 alone. Let’s not forget Iran and all of its terrorist proxies.

Yet here at home, a Harvard-Harris poll from August 2025 found that 60% of Americans age 18-24 say they support Hamas, a terrorist organization, the very organization responsible for carrying out the attacks of over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. They trust Hamas more than they do Israel. That is the only age category in America that was polled that held that position. Every other age category sides with Israel and the Jewish people by margins ranging from 65 to 89%.

The numbers show a huge problem in propaganda driven by ideology and not facts.

Third, the media has inverted reality, and the receipts are in plain sight

After every major Jihadist attack, the media’s reflexive response is not to examine the ideology behind it. It is to pivot to warnings about Islamophobia. After 9/11. After Paris. Manchester. Bourbon Street. The Pulse Nightclub. And numerous other shootings that have transpired on American soil.

The media machine attempts to cover for Islam, often hiding the identity of the perpetrator or concealing the obvious motive. And according to FBI crime data, there is no widespread hatred or violence against Islam in the West, nor does it need to start. But there is an irrational apathy towards Islam. Contrast that with the actual antisemitism or Judeophobia, where there is a verifiable hatred, suspicion, and even fear of Jewish people, which defies rationale or logic.

Former MSNBC host Joy Reid demonstrated this comparison recently when she claimed the United States is only marginally better than Iran is for women, equating pro-life legislation with Islamic theocracy, where women are beaten to death for removing their hijab, or can be married off at age 9, or can be put to death for rape in an honor killing.

We have a total collapse in the West of moral reasoning. If we are incapable of making this moral distinction in the West, we will soon lose our civilization to a retrograde Islamic ideology that will not rest until there is total domination of society and that society has reverted back to seventh-century barbarism.

Fourth, truth is a theological obligation, not just a political option

Proverbs 14:5 tells us that the faithful witness does not lie. For Christians engaging the public square, we have to be honest, and we have to recognize that the truth is on our side. We are not only to tell our story of the Gospel accurately but also to name reality accurately against the lies of propaganda.

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest and most adaptive hatred. And today it operates under the auspices of “I’m just asking questions,” and look, “Anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism.” Also, “Christ is King.” But when it’s said today, especially by the Romanists and the integralists, it sounds less like “Jesus Christ is Lord and the only way of salvation,” and more like, “Take that, you Jew.”

There is a certain irony in a civilization sophisticated enough to coin the word Islamophobia but too sophisticated to notice what is actually happening. The West invented a label for a fear we declared irrational.

The result is a culture with a phobia about phobias. We’ve exchanged moral clarity for moral relativism and a Bolshevik-style revolution instead of a Billy Graham-style revival.

America needs revival. We have convinced ourselves that the oldest hatred, palpable, noticeable, documentable, and real, is actually a form of resistance against tyranny. It’s not.

We are not failing to see the threat clearly because the data is unclear. We’re failing to see it because seeing it will cost us something — the end of our delusion and the realization that we have a real internal fight on our hands inside the gates.

The West does not have an Islamophobia problem. We have an Islamoapathy problem. And right now, the truth is the greatest antidote.

Originally published at the Standing for Freedom Center.