When Jews are attacked, the world is often quick to ask why.
Was it a political grievance? A local dispute? A reaction to events thousands of miles away?
This reflex, to contextualize violence against Jews rather than name it for what it is, has become one of the most dangerous habits of our time.
More troubling still is the failure to name the crime itself.
This is precisely what happened when Oprah Winfrey responded to last week’s massacre on Australia’s Bondi Beach.
Her message of condolence read as if she were describing a natural disaster rather than a planned attack: “I just spent the last two weeks in Australia, walking Bondi just days ago. It’s hard to reconcile that sense of peace with the terror of last night,” she wrote. “My heart breaks for the victims, their families and loved ones, and all you Aussies.”
The omission is striking. There is no mention of Jews. No acknowledgment that this was a targeted act of anti-Jewish violence.
Read this way, Winfrey’s statement echoes an older and far more sinister tradition, one that recalls the Soviet Union’s official response to the 1941 massacre at Babi Yar.
Then, too, the state mourned “peaceful Soviet citizens” while deliberately erasing the fact those murdered were singled out precisely because they were Jewish.
Whether Winfrey’s comments come from deliberate obfuscation is unclear.
Nevertheless, the inability to name the victim and the perpetrator is part of the problem that will continue to contribute to the physical harm of Jews unless people speak with conviction and truth.
The Sydney Islamic terrorist attack should force a reckoning.
The ideology animating such violence against Jews is no longer marginal.
Anti-Zionism, the systematic demonization of Israel and those who support its existence, has moved from the fringes into mainstream political, academic and media discourse.
Anti-Zionism is not merely hostility toward a state. It is a worldview that treats Jewish sovereignty as uniquely illegitimate, Jewish self-defense uniquely criminal and Jewish collective identity uniquely suspect.
In practice, it does not distinguish between Israelis and Jews, Zionists and Jewish institutions or support for Israel and participation in civic life.
Synagogues become “Zionist targets.” Jewish students become “agents of apartheid and colonialism.” Jewish communities become fair game.
This ideology does not operate in isolation. It is produced, amplified and operationalized by a convergence of Islamist extremist networks and segments of the far left.
These movements differ in language and tactics, but they share a common objective: the delegitimization of Israel and, by extension, the marginalization of Jews within democratic societies.
Together, they pose a coordinated threat not only to Jews and Israel but to the moral and political foundations of the free world.
Critically, anti-Zionism is deadly, but it is not self-generating. It is taught. It is funded. It is normalized.
It circulates through classrooms, media outlets, international institutions and activist networks.
It relies on a familiar set of libels — the colonizer, apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing — as ideological weapons, not analytical categories.
These terms are deployed not to understand reality but to deny Jewish history and justify violence.
Yet governments, institutions and media continue to treat anti-Zionism as protected political speech rather than what it is: a form of contemporary Jew-hatred with global consequences.
That has real costs. Jewish communities are left unprotected. Democratic norms are hollowed out. Extremist movements gain legitimacy by cloaking hatred in the language of human rights.
Anti-Zionism must be recognized as a hate movement that targets Jews, Israel, those who support Israel and the democratic societies that defend pluralism and freedom.
Without naming the problem, there can be no meaningful response.
But recognition alone is not enough. Governments must also act against the networks that generate and disseminate anti-Zionist ideology.
Islamist extremist groups and far-left organizations that promote demonization, incitement and exclusion cannot be treated as legitimate participants in democratic discourse; they threaten the civic order itself.
Media institutions, too, bear responsibility.
For years, anti-Zionism has been laundered through the euphemism of “criticism of Israel.”
Criticism is specific, contextual and grounded in reality. Anti-Zionism is totalizing, moralizing and demonizing.
Pretending the two are interchangeable has allowed hate to flourish under the guise of journalism.
It is precisely because of this failure, across governments and civil society, that Stop Antizionism was launched. The initiative was created to serve both the Jewish community and the broader free democratic world by exposing anti-Zionism as an ideological threat to Jews, Israel and the United States. Through education, advocacy and policy engagement, Stop Antizionism seeks to restore conceptual clarity where confusion has been weaponized.
One of the initiative’s central tools is a global declaration that states, plainly and unequivocally, anti-Zionism is Jew-hatred. It’s not symbolic. Courts, administrators, educators and policymakers repeatedly claim there is “no consensus” on whether anti-Zionism constitutes discrimination.
History teaches that hatred thrives when it is misnamed — or, as in Oprah’s statement, unnamed.
The refusal to identify anti-Zionism as Jew-hatred has already cost Jewish communities dearly.
Left unchallenged, it will continue to corrode democratic norms and embolden those who view violence as justified resistance.
Naya Lekht is an Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy research fellow.
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