From December 2-4, the 2025 North American Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana. According to a press release from the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), the organization convening this extravaganza, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell will welcome municipal leaders to three days of “panels, workshops, and conversations” about “strengthening community resilience and countering antisemitic hate.” The event will reportedly bring in mayors from across the country, including Beverly Hills Mayor Sharona Nazarian, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering, and North Miami Mayor Alix Desulme. New York City Mayor Eric Adams will attend as a guest of honor and is slated to receive an award for what CAM describes as “exceptional leadership in the fight against antisemitism.” (A press release from CAM also listed New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno as a participant, but when Current Affairs reached out to her for comment, a spokesperson confirmed that Moreno was never scheduled to attend the event and had no prior knowledge she was listed as a participant.)

Indeed, for the attendees, it’ll be a wonderful time to be in New Orleans. The weather will be mild, the holiday lights will be twinkling along Canal Street, and the inaugural New Orleans Michelin Guide was published just in time for these visiting dignitaries to make the best dinner reservations. Perhaps they’ll squeeze in a leisurely stroll through the French Quarter, a fancy cocktail or two, and some light shopping before the panels begin. Meanwhile, as they congratulate themselves on safeguarding Jewish communities from the antisemitic terrors of Manhattan, Miami Beach, and Beverly Hills, some 6,000 miles away, the people of Gaza are living through a nightmare with no end in sight.

CAM is staffed heavily with former Israeli military and government communications operatives. Its CEO, Sacha Roytman-Dratwa, previously served in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and went on to establish and command its New Media Division, where he spent four and a half years shaping the unit’s “communications strategy” and “branding the IDF on social media.” Roytman-Dratwa has publicly denounced calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and even demanded the resignation of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for supposedly applying “different rules” to Jews. CAM’s editor-in-chief, Barney Breen-Portnoy, is likewise a former IDF spokesperson. The Jewish Council of Australia, responding to CAM’s parallel “Mayors Summit” on the Gold Coast, describes the group bluntly as “a far-right lobbying outfit designed to push a one-sided, pro-Israel agenda and silence criticism of Israel’s war on Palestinians.” 

On paper, CAM presents itself as a neutral “coalition” of hundreds of organizations across the political spectrum that simply want to “fight the world’s oldest hatred.” In reality, it is a lobbying vehicle created in 2019 by Kansas oil magnate and Republican megadonor Adam Beren, owner of the energy company Berexco. Beren has given over $1 million to Trump-aligned political committees and was appointed by Donald Trump to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 2019. According to FEC filings, Beren has poured tens of thousands more into individual GOP candidates and committees—including more than $50,000 to Michael Whatley, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, over $20,000 to New York Republican Elise Stefanik, and $25,000 to Florida Republican Randy Fine, who once declared, “If you’re not an Islamophobe, you’re a fool.” Beren also bankrolls politicians such as Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who openly promises to dismantle environmental protections and roll back the Biden administration’s anti-pollution and energy-efficiency rules.

CAM’s advisory council includes figures like Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations who has openly endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and Isaac Herzog, a longtime Knesset member and now president of Israel whose statements have been cited as evidence in the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel. The organization’s tagline is “for the Jewish people, their homeland and humanity,” and one of the group’s creators and advisors, Misha Galperin, acknowledged that despite its name, defending Israel is central to its mission. CAM’s finances are opaque. It has not filed a public 990 tax form on which nonprofits must disclose their officers and major expenses. Galperin has refused to identify the group’s donors, saying only that it is funded by “a few people” who prefer to remain anonymous.

A glance at the agenda reveals that the mayors’ conference is not really about “combating antisemitism” at all. This event is about getting city governments to suppress pro-Palestine activism, plain and simple. At gatherings like the New Orleans summit, CAM urges mayors to adopt its “Municipal Antisemitism Action Index,” a framework explicitly designed to suppress pro-Palestine activism. The Index markets itself as “a comprehensive classification system” meant to “inspire municipalities to take meaningful steps in combating antisemitism” and “foster inclusive, hate-free communities.” But its very first benchmark is the “Adoption of IHRA Definition and Hate Crime Legislation,” which folds mainstream political speech critical of Israel into its definition of antisemitism. Merriam-Webster defines antisemitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group,” which is a perfectly good and accurate definition. The IHRA definition, by contrast, expands the term beyond bigotry into the realm of political thought-crime. Among other actions, it classifies the following as antisemitic: 

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

These are not fringe positions, but core components of contemporary human-rights analysis and, in many cases, basic descriptions of fact. The IHRA definition sneaks these examples in only after listing genuine examples of antisemitism, such as “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews,” a sequencing that makes it more difficult to criticize the definition without appearing to excuse actual antisemitism. The Index’s next benchmark, “Enhance Penalties for Hate Crimes,” calls for upgrading hate-crime charges from a Class C to a Class B felony. When combined with mandatory adoption of the IHRA definition, the result is a legal environment in which ordinary political speech could be treated as evidence of a hate crime, subject to the same penalties as violent assault or serious fraud.

The Index goes much further. It recommends that municipalities impose an anti-BDS policy barring cities from doing business with companies that boycott or divest from Israel; adopt “anti-masking” legislation to criminalize protesters who cover their faces; and even prohibit city councils from endorsing ceasefire resolutions related to Israel on the grounds that foreign policy is “the jurisdiction of the federal government.” Cities are also required to “discipline” educators who “distort” October 7, incorporate Israeli history into public-school “World History or Government” curricula, and establish “an annual event to remember the October 7 massacre.” Needless to say, there is no corresponding requirement to teach the history of Palestinian dispossession, no recognition of the hundreds of thousands murdered in Gaza, and no suggestion that American students learn about the Nakba or the West Bank occupation.

Elsewhere, CAM makes it explicit that their entire project depends on redefining advocacy for Palestinian rights as a form of antisemitic discrimination. In its annual report, Echoes of the Past and a Warning for the Present: The Stark Reality of Record-Breaking Antisemitism in 2024, CAM claims that “the overwhelming dominance of far-left ideology” now drives antisemitism in the United States, citing a supposed 324 percent surge in incidents. But what counts as “far-left antisemitism” turns out to be nothing more than the basic vocabulary of human rights. The report explicitly designates terms like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” as “implicit indicators” of antisemitism. The report even revives McCarthyite red-scare hysteria, claiming that “demonstrations featuring Communist flags” or “banners from organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation” should be counted as “explicit indicators” of antisemitism. Furthermore, the report claims that campus movements for Palestinian liberation, which are frequently organized by anti-Zionist Jewish students, are only “masquerading as anti-Israel activism” while secretly promoting a hidden agenda of antisemitic violence. These designations reclassify relatively uncontroversial political dissent, including views shared by the majority of Americans who oppose Israel’s destruction of Gaza, into evidence of “antisemitic extremism.” 

From “Echoes of the Past and a Warning for the Present: The Stark Reality of Record-Breaking Antisemitism in 2024,” Combat Antisemitism Movement

Even more dangerously, CAM collapses the Palestine solidarity movement into moral equivalence with actual fascism, placing “far-right, Nazi, or Neo-Nazi” activity on the same continuum as “anti-Zionist/Israel-related antisemitism,” which they define to include accusing Israel of being inherently racist, committing genocide, or maintaining apartheid. The problem for CAM, of course, is that Israel is in point of fact inherently racist, committing genocide, and maintaining apartheid. It is now the consensus position of international human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, American Friends Service Committee, the International Federation for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, UN human rights experts, the UN Special Committee on Palestinian Rights, and leading genocide scholars that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide in Gaza. To dismiss these conclusions as “antisemitic” is intellectually unserious, a transparent attempt to silence anyone even mildly critical of Israel, and the sort of maneuver one expects from theocrats and fascist bullies, not from advocates of the “only democracy in the Middle East.”

CAM isn’t the only Zionist organization that deceptively stretches the meaning of “antisemitism” to encompass criticism of the Israeli government. The Anti-Defamation League claims that it “does not include criticism of Israel” in its antisemitic incident data, yet in the very same report it counts phrases like “Zionism is terrorism” and “From the river to the sea” (a slogan Benjamin Netanyahu himself has repeatedly used in reference to Israel) as incidents of antisemitism. Such sleight-of-hand allows the ADL to inflate its numbers with ordinary expressions of pro-Palestine political speech. Jewish Currents analyzed the ADL’s 2023 audit and found that only 56 percent of the cases involved clear, targeted antisemitism, while 17 percent were non-antisemitic expressions of anti-Zionism. By blurring the line between an unprompted assault on a visibly Orthodox Jewish man and a person holding a “Free Palestine” sign, groups like CAM and the ADL make it easier for neo-Nazis to dismiss allegations of antisemitism as politically motivated, even when the incident in question is plainly targeted, violent, and bigoted. This matters because, as Jewish Currents points out, the ADL’s inflated numbers have been repeatedly invoked by politicians, media outlets, and law enforcement to justify crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests.

CAM’s Municipal Antisemitism Index mirrors a broader national strategy being developed by the Heritage Foundation and Trump-aligned operatives under the banner of Project Esther, a federal blueprint that redefines pro-Palestine activism as a “terrorist support network.” Readers would do well to examine Project Esther themselves, because it is difficult to grasp the scale of its paranoia without seeing it firsthand. Project Esther opens with the claim that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network,” asserting without evidence that groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace are not advocacy organizations but “effectively a terrorist support network” backed by “nihilist supporters” who are “dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy.” The document claims these groups draw their worldview from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and that after Hamas’s October 7 attack, activists “pounced on Hamas’s pogrom, intending to use it as a George Floyd–style event to spring onto center stage and grab a giant microphone.” Project Esther warns that the “Hamas Support Network” has “corrupted the U.S. education system,” “leveraged the American media,” and “coopted the federal government,” asserting that “there is an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington—all apparently aligned with the far left, progressive movement.” Ironically, the Heritage Foundation’s portrayal of these pro-Palestine groups echoes the rhetoric of antisemitic conspiracists like Alex Jones or QAnon, who insist that Jews secretly run a malevolent “global cabal.”

Project Esther even likens Palestine solidarity organizations to the German American Bund, a Nazi group founded in 1936, and then cites with approval the response of “Jewish gangsters” like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel who “coordinated ‘less than kosher’ activities, pro bono, to disrupt and thwart the Bund,” the implication being that extra-legal coercion (mob violence) is an appropriate model for responding to today’s nonviolent pro-Palestine protest movement. They also identify a supposed “Hamas Caucus” in Congress—naming Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar, André Carson, Hank Johnson, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders, Chris Van Hollen, and Elizabeth Warren—and suggest that the executive branch is unwilling to “prosecute” their activity. If CAM is the municipal arm of this agenda (rewriting city ordinances, school curricula, and protest rules), Project Esther is the federal counterpart, a plan to nationalize these same restrictions and convert accusations of “antisemitism” into a framework for policing the pro-Palestine movement at every level of civic life.

As Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist now serving as Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, put it at CAM’s State Leadership Summit, “what you’re doing at the state level is really where it happens… the real successes and achievements of government are more likely to happen at the local and state level than they are in Washington, D.C.” And that, of course, is the point of this summit. Municipal governments are easier to pressure, faster to move, and far less scrutinized. And in a country where most people live in metropolitan areas, big-city mayors can function as pressure points for influencing the political climate of the country as a whole. If you can convince (or bribe with an all-expenses-paid vacation to New Orleans) a few dozen city leaders to launder your talking points into local law, you can alter the civic and political landscape long before anyone grasps the scale of the change.

The people shaping this effort are not exactly subtle about their worldview. Huckabee, who boasts of spending “as much time with Netanyahu” as with his own wife, and who has previously said that Israel is akin to being the “wife” of the United States, recently dismissed the evidence of famine in Gaza by pointing to the work of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), claiming that GHF’s shipments prove there is “plenty” of aid and that reports of starvation are a hoax. Huckabee even mocked starving Gazans by saying Hamas officials are “well fed” and “could use some Ozempic.” As a Jewish person myself, it feels tawdry and obscene to watch Zionist organizations cast American Jews as uniquely imperiled victims in total isolation from what is being done to Palestinians in our name. On its face, of course “combating antisemitism” sounds like an unassailable cause, but CAM is bastardizing the term in order to criminalize criticism of the Israeli government. CAM’s website contains a “news” section purporting to catalogue incidents of antisemitic abuse, yet many of the cases it highlights are either wildly misleading or plainly not antisemitism at all. One recent article applauds Marco Rubio for imposing sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, whom CAM accuses of “legitimizing terrorism” and promoting “Jew-hatred.” What the piece neglects to mention or refute is that these sanctions were issued in direct retaliation for a major UN report Albanese had just released, documenting how American corporations such as Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon are enabling and profiting from Israel’s displacement of Palestinians in violation of international law. 

Another article covers a protest outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, which CAM breathlessly describes as an “escalating threat to Jewish life.” The article is framed as if the protesters had targeted the synagogue simply for being Jewish. In reality, the protest was directed at Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that had rented space in the synagogue to host a real estate event promoting American Jewish migration to settlements in the occupied West Bank, settlements which are illegal under international law. In other words, demonstrators were protesting a political organization marketing stolen land, not the existence of a synagogue. “A sign reading ‘Brooklyn out of Palestine’ targeted one of the largest Jewish communities in the United States. In this context, ‘Brooklyn’ functioned as a euphemism for Jews,” the article reads, “the message communicated that Jews should be barred from Israel, denying their right to live in the Jewish homeland and reinforcing a familiar pattern of discriminatory hostility.” According to CAM, you are antisemitic unless you believe that Americans Jews are entitled to colonize Palestinian territory and entitled to feel persecuted when anyone objects, but, to quote Christopher Hitchens, “if a Jew born in Brooklyn has a right to a state in Palestine, then surely a Palestinian born in Jerusalem does too.” 

Yet another article titled “Exposing the Online Radicalism of the University of Oklahoma’s Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter” claims to offer “a sample of three items” demonstrating the group’s supposed extremism. The first example? An Instagram story featuring a Palestinian flag with the caption “resistance is justified,” which CAM argues is a call to violence. This isn’t the only time CAM treats the mere sight of a Palestinian flag as evidence of antisemitism. Natan Sharansky, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel who now serves as Chair of CAM's Global Advisory Board, appears in a 2024 video on the organization’s YouTube channel decrying an “unprecedented wave of antisemitism,” while b-roll shows nothing more than students waving Palestine flags, including one holding a sign that reads “Palestine has always been a land with a people.” Sharansky then launches into a rambling denunciation of “neo-Marxist oppressor/oppressed theories,” warning that American universities are brainwashing students with “Marxist-Leninist” ideology. 

CAM supplements these political pressures with a curated media ecosystem designed to ensure that officials hear only one story about Israel and Palestine. This is why the New Orleans summit is emceed by Jacki Karsh, a Los Angeles media personality who calls herself a “journalist” but behaves much more like a PR officer for the Israeli government. As Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports for Drop Site News, Karsh has described October 7 as the moment she realized “this was going to be a war of information,” quoting an Israeli official who urged supporters to fight on the “battlegrounds of academia, law, business, media, and every other damn front we can think of.” Karsh is admirably candid about seeing journalism as her battlefield. “This is my front. Journalism is my front,” she says, casting herself as a combatant in an “information war” for Israel. Yet in a December 2024 Jewish Journal column titled “Editorial Bias: Campus Newspapers Must Stop Marginalizing Jews,” she denounces exactly this “dangerous nexus of journalism and activism” when it comes from student newspapers that are critical of Israeli policy. In that piece, she laments that campus newsrooms have become a “breeding ground” for rhetoric that “vilifies Israel” and warns that student journalists are entering global newsrooms “untethered to the principles of balance and integrity.” In other words, student journalists are “activists” the moment they publish verifiable information about mass civilian death and destruction in Gaza, but when Karsh decides that her own “journalistic front” must be aligned with the interests of the Israeli state, suddenly it is not advocacy, but some kind of higher journalistic calling.

In 2025, she and her husband launched the Karsh Journalism Fellowship, a program that bills itself as “resolutely nonpartisan” while being “the world’s only journalism fellowship solely dedicated to Jewish topics.” In reality, it functions as an incubator for the kind of politicized “information war” she insists student journalists must avoid. The fellowship offers a $4,000 stipend, fully covered travel and lodging, and access to “leading journalists, scholars, policymakers, and cultural figures,” all with the stated goal of empowering fellows to produce reporting with “exceptional depth and authority on Jewish issues.” Karsh has stocked the program with “mentors” who share her worldview, including CNN’s Van Jones, who recently appeared on an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher to argue that young Americans only care about Gaza because Iran and Qatar are manipulating their social-media feeds with what Jones describes as “Dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby”—a line he delivered with a big smile as the audience laughed along. Another Karsh Fellowship mentor, Michael Powell, a staff writer at The Atlantic (the worst magazine in America), recently published an article called “The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World,” which portrays human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders as ideologically “captured” by the left. It frames documented Israeli atrocities as matters of “heated debate” and treats accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide not as legal findings by international bodies but as the hysterics of young staffers blinded by “critical theories of social justice.” Taken together, the Karsh Fellowship is cultivating a media class that will dutifully recycle CAM’s messaging, a worldview that resurfaces almost verbatim at its political gatherings.

Setting all of this aside—the censorship, the hysteria, the outright fabrication—one is left with a simpler, more bewildering question: why the hell would any Democratic politician go out of their way to honor a shameless criminal like Eric Adams? Adams, who is set to receive CAM’s “Medal of Mayoral Honor” at the New Orleans summit, is a regular on the group’s conference circuit. In 2024, he headlined CAM’s “Voices for Truth: Influencers Against Antisemitism” gala, co-organized with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he demanded a “full frontal assault” on social media algorithms for showing Israel’s indiscriminate annihilation of Gaza, and sneered, “I cannot believe you could have any organization in this country that calls themselves ‘Gays for Hamas,’ are you kidding me?” In fact, no such organization exists, but Adams’s line feeds directly into a familiar pinkwashing trope (one Netanyahu himself recites constantly) that is used to deflect criticism of Israel’s genocidal war crimes while ignoring the fact that Israel still bans civil marriage and forces queer and interfaith couples to marry abroad. The same year Adams made those remarks, he was indicted on federal bribery, conspiracy, and campaign finance charges, becoming the first sitting New York mayor to be criminally charged. As Katherine Krueger wrote for Current Affairs, “he is a crook of an order not often glimpsed by the public in the modern era,” not because his corruption was sophisticated or impressive, but because it was so pathetically “low-brow and penny-ante”—discounted airline tickets, concealing illegal campaign funds from Turkey, and petty influence-peddling schemes. Nonetheless, as Krueger writes:

Make no mistake: Eric Adams has been an evil mayor. He sold New Yorkers out for a highly irregular sweetheart deal with Donald Trump’s administration, giving ICE free rein to carry out its fascistic deportation sweeps in the city and operate within Riker’s Island in exchange for making those federal corruption charges go away. He’s decimated our libraries, universal pre-K, and homelessness services—going as far as declaring war on homeless people sleeping on the train—and super-charged the deployment of NYPD in our subway system to bust fare jumpers, harass ladies selling mango slices, and stare at their phones. He’s launched brutal police crackdowns against pro-Palestinian protesters. He mismanaged the city’s response to the influx of migrants he said would “destroy New York City,” first by handing out eviction notices and now by closing many of the shelters, handing a propaganda win to some of the country’s most evil and powerful people, who are foaming at the mouth to portray the city as a fallen metropolis.

In spite of all this, it makes perfect sense that CAM would honor Adams as his disgraceful, scandal-ridden tenure as New York City Mayor comes to an end. During a recent gala in Israel that was also organized by CAM, Adams told an audience in occupied East Jerusalem that he “served” Israeli Jews just as much as he served New Yorkers. “I wanted to come back here to Israel and let you know that I served you as the mayor,” Adams said, an unusually honest summary of his priorities.

Adams won’t be the only indicted dignitary at CAM’s New Orleans Mayoral Summit. Joining him onstage will be the city’s own LaToya Cantrell, whose corruption is just as outlandish and flamboyant. Like Adams, Cantrell is a familiar fixture on the CAM conference circuit. At the 2024 Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism in Beverly Hills, she bragged about cracking down on student protesters in New Orleans, recounting that “when protesters came to one of our colleges, I said, ‘oh no—like my mother said, you have to nip it in the bud,’ and we did.” In practice, “nipping it in the bud” meant sending in Tulane police, NOPD, state troopers, and sheriff’s deputies to tear down a small, nonviolent Gaza encampment on Tulane’s front lawn in the middle of the night and haul away student protesters in handcuffs. Like Adams, Cantrell was also recently indicted on a raft of corruption charges, including federal wire-fraud and obstruction of justice, for allegedly using public money to carry on a secret affair with her police bodyguard, then lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury, deleting thousands of messages, and leaning on subordinates to keep the whole thing quiet. Another federal probe into Cantrell alleges that a city inspector and a local businessman bribed her with “New Orleans Saints football tickets, an iPhone, and a steak dinner” in exchange for favorable treatment in city permitting decisions. These are the people CAM has chosen to elevate as moral authorities in the “fight against antisemitism.”

With Zohran Mamdani now the mayor-elect of New York City, this year’s CAM summit will almost certainly be a three-day meltdown over the supposed “antisemitism” of a left-wing, Muslim mayor who openly condemns Israeli war crimes. CAM has already issued a torrent of statements condemning Mamdani. “Jewish New Yorkers are right to be alarmed,” says Lisa Katz, the Chief Government Affairs Officer of CAM, who will be in attendance at the New Orleans summit, because “a Mamdani administration will refuse to recognize as antisemitism hate that vilifies and demonizes Jews on the basis of the Jewish people’s connection to Israel.” In a separate statement, CAM condemns the DSA for accurately pointing out that the Gaza “ceasefire” is nothing of the sort. “Both Mamdani and the DSA refuse to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, yet routinely accuse Israel of committing ‘genocide,’” CAM writes, “this rhetoric directly violates the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.” CAM even tweeted what appears to be an AI-generated video of a pair blimps flying over Rockefeller Center in New York City emblazoned with the words “antisemitism will never win” accompanied by the caption “Mamdani, we have a message for you.” It’s safe to say Mamdani will be the talk of the town at the New Orleans summit, even though he is obviously not an antisemite at all, but a pro-Palestine Muslim socialist who speaks about antisemitism with more clarity and empathy than anyone on CAM’s stage.

The entitlement of this entire spectacle is nauseating. While Gaza is being starved and bombed, a well-funded lobby of mayors and political operatives is flying into New Orleans to workshop new ways of criminalizing the people trying to stop the slaughter, all while reveling in their own performative victimhood and pinning medals on Eric Adams. By stretching the definition of “antisemitism” until it encompasses almost anything a Palestinian could possibly say about their own dispossession, CAM is doing something extremely dangerous. It is making it easier for neo-Nazis and fascists like the streamer Nick Fuentes, an open admirer of Adolf Hitler, to claim that accusations of antisemitism are nothing more than political weapons wielded on Israel’s behalf. If “antisemitism” is redefined as “opposition to a U.S.-backed genocide,” the term will become completely meaningless. Anyone who cares about Jewish safety, Palestinian freedom, or the basic right to speak honestly about America’s foreign policy should treat what’s happening at this summit as an attempt to criminalize nonviolent activism at a moment that demands our solidarity and resistance.