We’ve Seen This Movie Before. Don’t Sit Through It Twice.

American Jews need to take back the narrative.

This week, we stood outside The New York Times because the paper of record had printed a story that the Israeli government is now suing the paper for, as a blood libel. Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column accused Israeli soldiers of systematically raping Palestinian prisoners, including the lurid claim that guards used dogs to rape detainees. His sourcing leaned heavily on a monitoring group whose leadership has been photographed with senior Hamas officials. The column ran on Monday. The next day, the Israeli Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children released a 300-page report documenting thirteen distinct patterns of rape, sexual torture, and mutilation perpetrated against Israeli women, men and children. The Times has not acknowledged the report, and has not retracted Kristof’s story.

About 200 of us gathered on a Manhattan sidewalk on Thursday. We chanted, “Stop the libels, stop the hate.” Some carried signs that said “J’accuse” next to The Times’ logo, because we are not the first generation of Jews to watch a paper of record manufacture a case against us.

I want to say something specific about what an organic protest looks like, because I have organized them and stood in them. Six years ago I helped lead the rallies to reopen New York City schools. Parents arrived with their own handmade signs. Nobody handed us a script, bused us in or paid us. You could tell because the signs all said different things, and the people holding them looked like the parents at your kid’s school; they were the parents at your kid’s school.

Compare that to what we have been watching for two years now in the streets of Western capitals. Matching preprinted placards stacked on the curb. Coordinated chants on cue. Paid organizers. A Hezbollah flag flying over a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn this past Monday. This is not grassroots. It is a rent-a-cause that has taken over the Western hemisphere, and it is funded.

Now look at the New York Magazine feature this week, written as a eulogy for Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. The piece tracked so closely with a Washington Post takedown from five days earlier that the Post’s Drew Harwell placed the stories two ledes side by side and posted them on X. New York Magazine quietly issued a credit at the bottom of the page hours later. Now read the actual numbers before you accept the obituary. According to Barrett Media’s tally of the Social Blade data, Shapiro’s YouTube channel is down roughly 200,000 subscribers over the year off a base of 7.2 million, which works out to about a 2% decline. Views are down 34% year over year, a long way from the 85% figure that went viral on X. Layoffs at the Daily Wire did happen. Candace Owens claimed they were 60% of staff. Sources at the company put the real number much lower. The Daily Wire is not dying. The mainstream media wants you to believe it is. The same outlets writing the eulogy for the loudest pro-Israel voice in conservative media are the same outlets running cover for what is happening to Jews across the Five Eyes countries right now. Look up the U.K. Look up Australia. Look up New Zealand. Look up Canada. Then tell me this is only an American problem.

We have seen this movie before. Jay Bhattacharya, now the director of the National Institutes of Health, named it: the illusion of consensus. Six years ago, Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta signed the Great Barrington Declaration arguing for focused protection of the vulnerable against COVID instead of total societal lockdown. They were applying the existing, evidence-based pandemic playbook. Within four days, NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Anthony Fauci dismissing them as “three fringe epidemiologists,” and demanding “a quick and devastating published takedown” of their premises. The legacy press carried it out. Most Americans never heard the names of the dissenting epidemiologists until they had already been primed to distrust them. A consensus was never formed; a blackout was rebranded as one.

The Biden administration was writing the style guide. The teachers’ unions were marking up the good actors and the bad actors. The legacy press repeated both. Our kids paid. Six years on, we still have not reckoned with what was done to a generation of American children in the name of a manufactured agreement.

The same machinery is running again right now, pushing Jew-hatred and antizionism.  Deciding what the public is allowed to think. Tarring the dissenters. Blacking out the inconvenient experts. Flooding the zone with matching signs and matching chants and calling it a movement. Printing the libel on the opinion page of the paper of record. Writing the eulogy for anyone with a microphone who pushed back.

This is not a moment for new laws. We have laws. We have a country. We have the First Amendment. What we need now is to stop falling for the trick. The information sphere is wider than it was six years ago, and the burden has shifted to all of us, Jewish and not. Read past the headline. Pull the primary document. Check the actual numbers. Notice when every protester on the block is holding the same sign. We are being manipulated, by the same people, with the same playbook. We did not stop it the first time. There is no excuse for sitting through it twice.

Natalya Murakhver is a documentary filmmaker, co-founder of Restore Childhood, and director of “15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.” Follow Natalya’s work at https://restorechildhood.substack.com/.