Deborah Lipstadt Is Right About Mississippi and Intifadas

Soon after last week’s attack on a synagogue in Mississippi, Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. envoy for combating antisemitism, suggested there might be a link between the arson and the “Globalize the Intifada” campaign mounted by Hamas supporters around the world.

When the Mississippi arsonist was revealed to be a far-right white supremacist, critics challenged Lipstadt, asserting that she should retract her statement since the attacker was not an Arab or a Muslim.

But Ambassador Lipstadt got it right. 

The term “intifada” may have originated with the Palestinian Arabs, but since October 7, it has morphed into a general rallying cry for war against Jews everywhere. The addition of the word “globalize” and the spread of the war across the globe prove it. Burning Jews in Colorado and shooting Jews in Australia are expressions of this new, globalized intifada.

So is the targeting of synagogues. The burning of the synagogue in Mississippi was cut from the same cloth as the assault on Jews at a synagogue in Manchester, England, last Yom Kippur and the recent besieging of synagogues in New York and New Jersey. Those outrages are the handiwork of those whose hatred has led them to perceive Jewish houses of worship, anywhere in the world, as legitimate targets. 

The fact that the attackers sometimes are aligned with the far left and sometimes with the far right is immaterial. Antisemites have never been strictly bound by the political categories to which we reflexively assign them.

There is a long and sordid history of extremists from one end of the political spectrum making common cause with those at the other end—when the cause is hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.

As far back as the 1960s, European neo-Nazis developed extensive ties with Palestinian Arab terrorists. Belgian neo-Nazis Jean Tireault and Karl Van De Put reportedly served as advisers to Fatah, the main faction of the PLO. A prominent Swiss neo-Nazi, Francois Geroude, raised funds for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. 

The German neo-Nazi newspaper Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldatern-Zeitung in the 1970s printed appeals for volunteers to join the PLO. German neo-Nazi activist Willi Pohl assisted with the logistics for the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, including driving the mastermind of the attack, Abu Daoud, around Germany in the weeks leading up to the assault.

Members of two neo-Nazi movements, the “Adolf Hitler Free Corps” and the Hoffman Sports Group, were arrested in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s for smuggling arms to the PLO and in some cases serving in its ranks. 

In our own era, white supremacists Nick Fuentes, David Duke (of the Ku Klux Klan) and mixed martial arts fighter Jake Shields have become enthusiastic boosters of the Palestinian Arab cause. They regularly accuse Israel of “genocide” and rail against “Zionist control” of the news media—in language identical to that of the anti-Israel far-left.

Duke and the radical-left British social media activist Sulaiman Ahmed evidently found much in common when they met in Detroit in 2024. Ahmed’s 500,000-plus followers on X do not seem to have been troubled by his embrace of the far-right Duke. They see themselves as comrades in arms, in a new intifada that crosses political and national boundaries.

Deborah Lipstadt is right. The first two intifadas were confined to Israel and the territories it administers. But the Third Intifada has gone global. Every synagogue, from Manchester to Mississippi, is now a target.

The poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Hamas supporters said, again and again, that they intended to globalize the intifada. Now they have done it.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news