July 18, 2025

When you’re under attack, the very first thing on your mind is to defend yourself.

What’s the second thing? There is no second thing. There is only the urgency of swinging your fists and fighting off your attackers.

The Jewish community has every reason these days to swing its fists. The attacks just keep coming: What choice do we have?

The bad news seems to follow Jews. A recent survey from the ADL informed us that almost a quarter of Americans said attacks against Jews were “understandable.”

An analysis from Honest Reporting told us that “Last year, antisemitism surged across American campuses like never before. What started as protest became open hate, fueled not just by students, but by the institutions meant to uphold academic integrity.”

Meanwhile, a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute revealed “How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization (Hamas).”

And on and on.

For Jews today, there is no shortage of reasons to raise our fists and fight back.

But as we fight back, I’d like to suggest we add a second component — let’s also fight forward. Simply put, we can visualize our community as falling into two camps: those who fight back and those who fight forward.

Those who fight back are the pros — the many organizations whose mission is to call out and condemn antisemitism in all its forms, do everything possible to eradicate it and protect Jews and Jewish places that are most vulnerable.

This group is varied and endless. While some organizations and initiatives overlap, they’re all fighting back in their own way.

The second group — the one that fights forward — is not a group per se.

These are people like you and me who work during the day and cannot devote their professional lives to traditional activism. But they worry a lot about Jews and Israel and spend an inordinate amount of time following the news.

Here’s the point: Why not begin a movement of Jews who will spend less time following the news and more time fighting forward? Fighting forward means fighting for the Jewish future — strengthening Jewish identity, teaching the Jewish tradition, building Jewish pride, learning the Jewish story, gathering around Shabbat tables, and so on.

We’re blessed to have so many professional activists who fight back on behalf of the community so that we can fight forward. Fighting forward is something we can all do in our everyday lives. While the pros fight the bad news, we can create some good news in our own little worlds.

Fighting forward, in short, is not really about fighting. It’s more about inspiring, elevating, remembering, creating, honoring, connecting and doing whatever one can do to help strengthen the Jewish future.

Of course, the camps overlap. The “fight forward” camp includes Jews who donate and volunteer with the “fight back” camp, just as the “fight back” camp is as committed to the Jewish future. But this doesn’t preclude the need to delineate both missions and inject a “fight forward” mentality in our community.

Human beings need to stay busy. When something bothers us, we need to take action. When we feel threatened, we need to fight back. Given that so many Jewish groups are already fighting back, the rest of the community has an opportunity to complement that fight through an approach of fighting forward. 

That’s community teamwork: Expert activists who fight back to defend our safety and dignity, and passionate Jews who fight forward to strengthen Jewish identity.

We have both. We need both.

As the world media continued to put Israel under a microscope, drawing attention to every incident of violence in Gaza and usually buying the Hamas spin, a massacre was happening not far away in Syria.

“Eyewitnesses and monitoring groups accuse the Syrian Transitional Security Forces of executing Druze civilians in cold blood,” Rizik Alabi reported on July 16 in The Media Line. “One of the most harrowing video clips shared online showed ten Druze men drenched in blood inside the Al-Radwan madaafa, some lying motionless on the floor, others slumped on sofas. Torn photos of Druze clerics and smashed furniture lay scattered across the room, a chilling scene interpreted by many as a retaliatory message.”

If you don’t recall any worldwide condemnations of this murderous rampage, it’s because there wasn’t any.

As Melanie Phillips wrote in JNS, “this slaughter elicited no condemnation from those who, day in and day out, signal their own supposed virtue by falsely accusing Israel of war crimes…The likes of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch were silent. Al-Julani’s troops reportedly slaughtered the entire staff at Suweida’s hospital along with their patients. Yet from those who falsely accuse Israel of targeting hospitals in Gaza in order to kill patients and staff…there was only silence.”

Why was there only silence?

The answer is as obvious as it is shameful: No Jews were involved.

Indeed the only time the world seemed to wake up is when Israel came to the rescue of the Druze.

“Israel went into Syria to defend them,” Phillips writes. “The IDF conducted dozens of airstrikes targeting Syrian government troop convoys, and also struck the Syrian defense ministry headquarters in Damascus and sites near the presidential palace. Under this pressure, a ceasefire was agreed, and Syrian forces withdrew from Suweida.”

As Brooke Goldstein of The Lawfare Project posted on X, “The only country that didn’t stay silent was Israel. Home to a large Druze population, Israel acted immediately after these horrific videos surfaced.”

But because we’re talking about Israel, that’s not the way the mainstream media portrayed it. The L.A. Times, for example, offered this anodyne headline: “Israel Bombs Damascus Military HQ as sectarian strife rages in Syria.”

Why would the Times erase the slaughter of Druze from its headline? Maybe because it didn’t fit their preferred “big bad Israel” narrative.

Ignoring massacres to focus on the Jews and Israel is nothing new. As Dumisani Washington posted on X after the Druze massacre, “It’s not just Syria. Islamic-led slavery and/or genocides are happening in Nigeria, Sudan, Mauritania, Libya, Algeria, the entire Western region of Africa, and more.”

But because Jews and Israel have had nothing to do with these genocidal war crimes, the world media has remained eerily silent.

Evidently, when Muslims or other non-Jews do the killing, it doesn’t hold the same drama as when Jews are involved. Jews, after all, are the cool people who run Hollywood, and Israel is the Start-Up Nation that is the envy of the region. It’s a much sexier story when they do the killing.

The converse, of course, is also true—it’s a much less interesting story when the Jews are the ones being killed.

Call it antisemitism, call it anti-Zionism, call it whatever you like. You can even call it cynical. I call it factual.

For the Druze being slaughtered in Syria, or the millions of war crime victims around the world who get no attention because Jews are not involved, do they really care who’s doing the killing?