How hatred of Jews became a common ground for Islamic terrorists and left‑wing extremists, fueling domestic terrorism

By Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell

Every major escalation in the Middle East sends shock waves far beyond the region. In the United States, those shock waves arrive not as distant tremors but as catalysts for domestic radicalization and violence, particularly against Jewish communities.

The data is unambiguous.

Following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the deaths of more than 1,200 Israelis and taking of more than 200 hostages, Israel’s military responded in a campaign that intensified the following year, killing more than 70,000 Gazans.

At the same time, in 2024 the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. – averaging more than 25 acts per day – the highest figure in the audit’s 46-year history.

FBI hate-crime statistics documented 1,938 anti-Jewish offenses in 2024, constituting 69% of all religion-based hate crimes. Jews comprise roughly 2% of the population.

The Secure Community Network, which provides Jewish communities in North America security services, tracked over 10,000 threat incidents and suspicious-activity reports since Oct. 7, 2023, including more than 500 credible threats to life in 2024.

Research shows similar trends following past military escalations in the Middle East.

Geopolitical violence abroad translates, with alarming efficiency, into homegrown threats in the U.S. and Canada. For the first time in the ADL audit’s history, a majority of incidents in 2024, 58%, contained elements explicitly related to Israel or Zionism. As someone who has studied domestic terrorism and hate for over 20 years, such dynamics are not surprising. They illustrate what my own research and that of others calls “imported conflict.”

The recent attacks against Jewish targets in Toronto, Michigan and possibly the one in San Jose underscore that the threat is neither abstract nor hypothetical.

Radicalization of strange bedfellows

Foreign conflict can become domestic violence via multiple pathways.

Left-wing extremists, Jihadi-inspired militants and far-right white supremacists occupy distinct spaces along the ideological spectrum, yet they converge on a shared target: Jews.

Each escalatory cycle in the Middle East energizes their exposure to and gradual adoption of extremist views. Online ecosystems accelerate the process dramatically.

Encrypted Telegram channels circulate operational guidance from jihadist media wings within hours of a Middle East strike, encouraging attacks against Jews wherever they can be found. On platforms like 4chan and Gab, white-supremacist accelerationists seize on the same events to amplify “great replacement” narratives casting Jews as orchestrators of unwanted demographic change.

Meanwhile, TikTok and Instagram accounts repackage eliminationist slogans, advocating the end of the state of Israel – “from the river to the sea,” “glory to the resistance” – as mainstream progressive content, reaching millions of young users whose algorithmic feeds reward outrage over nuance.

What once required years of indoctrination within a closed network can now unfold in weeks of passive scrolling.

On university campuses, the atmosphere has grown particularly volatile. Campus Jewish organization Hillel International documented 2,334 antisemitic incidents during the 2024–25 academic year, the highest since tracking began.

These confrontations involve physical intimidation, exclusion from student organizations and what the organization describes as the normalization of eliminationist language cloaked in social justice vocabulary.

Antisemitism as anti-racism

To understand the increasing ease with which geopolitical violence abroad turns into antisemitic violence in the U.S. requires understanding the ideological developments in recent progressive thinking.

One observation that our research demonstrates is that today’s antisemitism may not come from the political fringes but from within progressive movements themselves. Much of progressive ideological frameworks tend to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed. Because Jews are often seen as white, wealthy and well connected, they can get placed on the oppressor side of that line.

Intersectionality – a concept originally designed to show how different forms of disadvantage overlap – is now regularly used to justify shutting Jews out of progressive coalitions and solidarity campaigns.

According to ADL survey data, Americans who agreed with the belief that problems in the world “come down to the oppressor vs. the oppressed” were 2.6 times  more likely to hold negative or stereotypical views about Jewish people compared to those who disagreed with the statement.

I believe this is not a fringe problem. Among some parts of the intellectual and cultural elite, such as parts of academia, nonprofits and political parties, hostility toward Jews has become more apparent, with some suggesting that Jews simply do not deserve the same moral sympathy extended to other minorities. In some of these circles, if you do not accept that Jewish collective life is inherently oppressive, you are labeled a bad progressive and exiled.

A coalition of progressive California Democratic delegates pushed a resolution that opponents described as a Zionism “litmus test,” effectively requiring that delegates reject Zionism to be considered legitimate progressives. The D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, an influential progressive climate group, boycotted a voting rights rally because of “the participation of a number of Zionist organizations.”

Such dynamics reflect that there is little room in this framework for the complexity of Jewish history, people who have been both persecuted and resilient.

Furthermore, they can facilitate the rebranding of antisemitism as anti-racism. Some writers have noted that attacking Jewish influence can become a moral duty rather than a bigoted act. Antisemitism is renovated with concepts such as equity, decolonization and liberation, despite promoting the same traditional antisemitic tropes.

Strange alliance

I assert that multiple ideological movements targeting Jews reflect a deeper structural alignment between political Islam and segments of the progressive left.

Superficially, the two camps could hardly appear more different. Contemporary left-wing activism champions LGBTQ rights, environmentalism, social and economic equality, human rights and government transparency. Radical Islamist movements reject most of these commitments outright.

Beneath these contradictions appears to exist a shared ideological architecture powerful enough to sustain cooperation: anti-globalization, anti-imperialism, rejection of the Western nation-state, the primacy of collective identity over individual rights, a revolutionary vision and, most critically, a common set of enemies.

This alliance is visible in the protest movements that have erupted on American streets and campuses since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Marches under the banner of Palestinian liberation routinely feature Islamist slogans such as “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab” alongside progressive placards, or Hezbollah iconography beside “Queers for Palestine” signs. What binds this coalition is opposition to Israel, to American power, and, increasingly, to Jews as symbols of both.

For domestic security, this Red-Green alliance matters because it creates a shared radicalization experience in which grievances originating in very different worldviews are fused into a single call to action.

And as a scholar of political violence and extremism, I believe that when a progressive activist and an Islamist militant attend the same rally, share the same social media space and chant the same slogans, the boundary between political protest and operational violence becomes dangerously thin. Consider two recent cases.

In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez − steeped in anti-Zionist rhetoric and whom the ADL has called a far-left activist − shot and killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two young Israeli Embassy staffers, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., pulling out a keffiyeh and chanting “Free Palestine” as he was subdued. Weeks later in Boulder, Colorado, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, allegedly yelling “Free Palestine,” hurled Molotov cocktails at a weekly vigil for hostages held by Hamas, killing 82-year-old Karen Diamond.

These attackers occupied different positions on the spectrum between ideological radicalism and organized militancy, but they drew from the same well of dehumanizing language that circulates freely in spaces where political protest and incitement to violence have become indistinguishable.

Foreign crises, domestic failures

The structures governing how security agencies carry out their work in the U.S. are inadequate to this challenge.

Counterterrorism agencies seem to continue to treat Islamist militancy, far-right extremism and far-left radicalism as separate, unrelated threats. But the examples above point in a different direction: Ideologically distinct movements are converging on the same target − Jewish communities.

Meanwhile, civil rights agencies and nonprofit advocacy groups struggle to name progressive antisemitism for what it is, caught between legitimate commitments to anti-racism and the uncomfortable recognition that some anti-racist discourse has itself become bigotry.

Addressing the feedback loop between Middle East escalation and domestic antisemitic violence requires an honest reckoning with all of its sources – not only the familiar threats from jihadist networks and white supremacist cells, but also the ideological currents within progressive spaces that make hatred of Jews newly respectable.

Until policymakers, educators and leaders of civil society confront this threat’s full topology, Jewish Americans will continue to face a reality in which more than half report experiencing antisemitism in the past year and nearly half doubt that their neighbors would stand with them if the worst were to come.

This article first appeared on The Conversation and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.