When the Radical Left, the Hard Right, and the Self-Anointed Center All End Up Singing the Same Rotten Song
By Michael L. Weiss Ph.D., HCCP
There are some dinner parties one hopes never to attend.
I cannot imagine wanting to spend an evening seated between Thomas Friedman, Tucker Carlson, Bernie Sanders, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes. I suspect the appetizers would be insufferable, the conversation unbearable, and the collective self-regard powerful enough to alter the weather. And yet, despite their many differences, they have all managed to arrive at the same ugly conclusion: that the Jews, or Israel, have somehow dragged America into war yet again.
That alone should give us pause.
One says it with the polished confidence of a veteran columnist. Another with populist indignation. Another with the moral vanity of ideological certainty. Another with the shrill enthusiasm of someone who has mistaken provocation for wisdom. But strip away the tailoring, the branding, and the preferred vocabulary, and the accusation is the same. Israel is manipulating America. Jews are somehow responsible for the burden, the blood, and the cost of war. The United States, the most powerful nation on earth, is supposedly being led around like a confused tourist in a foreign bazaar.
It would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.
Because when people who agree on almost nothing suddenly agree that the Jews are to blame, history suggests that we should stop admiring the breadth of the coalition and start paying attention to the poison of the message.
There is, of course, nothing new about this. The language has been modernized, the platforms digitized, and the slogans pressed and polished for contemporary consumption, but the lie itself is ancient. Henry Ford trafficked in it. Charles Lindbergh dressed it up in patriotic concern. The Klan institutionalized it. The radical left repackaged it in the language of liberation and anti-imperialism. Different decades. Different wardrobes. Same malicious instinct.
Antisemitism is one of the few hatreds elastic enough to wear both Birkenstocks and jackboots. It can appear in a faculty lounge, on a cable panel, inside a protest movement, or in the darker corners of the internet where bad history goes to breed. It is endlessly adaptable because it is never really about facts. It is about utility. Jews remain, for far too many people, history’s most convenient explanation for complexity.
Today, one need not even say “the Jews” outright. One says “the Israel lobby.” One says “Netanyahu’s war.” One says “Zionist influence.” One says “America First” with a knowing glance toward Jerusalem. It all sounds very modern, very analytical, very sophisticated.
It is none of those things.
It is the same old accusation: that Jews manipulate powerful nations into fighting wars for Jewish purposes. It was false when Ford said it. It was false when Lindbergh implied it. It is false now.
What has changed is the climate in which this accusation now flourishes. The war in Gaza did not create antisemitism. That factory has been open for centuries and has never lacked for workers. But Gaza accelerated something that many people, including many otherwise intelligent observers, failed to appreciate quickly enough: the near-complete public fusion of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
What had long overlapped became, in plain sight, interchangeable.
“Israel,” “Zionist,” and “Jew” began to collapse into one another in the mouths of commentators, activists, and political performers. Criticism of policy became demonization of a state. Demonization of a state became suspicion of a people. And what passed for activism increasingly became a permission structure for saying ancient things in newly fashionable language.
Suddenly, hatred could masquerade as virtue.
One could recycle medieval libels and call it moral courage. One could indulge fantasies of Jewish manipulation, Jewish bloodlust, or Jewish power and present oneself not as a crank, but as a defender of human rights. That is not moral seriousness. It is scapegoating with better typography.
I have spent enough years in and around the Middle East to know the difference between legitimate criticism and ritualized demonization. Democracies deserve scrutiny. Governments deserve criticism. Strategies deserve debate. But when the conversation descends into the old suggestion that Jews are once again steering America toward war, we are no longer in the realm of policy analysis. We are back in the gutter of history, and that gutter, I regret to report, still has frequent visitors.
At this point, reason must be restored to the room.
The United States is not some helpless giant being manipulated by Jerusalem. American presidents are not marionettes. The Pentagon is not a stage production directed by Netanyahu. American intelligence professionals, military planners, diplomats, and elected leaders have not spent decades assessing Iranian aggression, regional instability, terrorism, proxy warfare, nuclear ambition, and strategic threats because someone in Tel Aviv slipped them a note.
That theory is not realism. It is fantasy for bitter people.
To believe that America acts only because Israel wills it, one must believe that generations of American leadership, across parties and administrations, have all somehow been hypnotized into abandoning American interests. One must also believe that American leaders who cannot agree on lunch have somehow agreed to subordinate the national interest to a foreign capital.
That is absurd.
America supports Israel because it is in America’s interest to support Israel. Not as charity. Not as sentimentality. Not because Washington has been played for a fool. America supports Israel because Israel is one of the few nations in the region that is dependable, capable, democratic, and strategically aligned with the United States.
Dependable. There is the word.
Not theatrically aligned. Not occasionally useful. Not friendly at conferences and absent when the room gets hot. Dependable.
Israel provides intelligence, military innovation, cyber expertise, counterterror capability, battlefield experience, and strategic insight of immense value to the United States. Israel does not merely issue statements. It acts. Israel does not merely protest threats. It confronts them. Israel does not merely survive pressure. It adapts under it.
That matters enormously to the United States.
In a world where too many of our traditional allies have become better at hosting summits than confronting danger, Israel remains one of the few nations that still understands what deterrence actually requires: strength, clarity, resolve, competence, and the willingness to absorb risk in defense of civilization rather than release yet another elegant communiqué while the house burns down.
And that brings us to Iran, because here too the conversation often suffers from selective amnesia.
Iran has been in a de-facto war with America and the West since 1979. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not diplomatic misunderstandings. They were the opening act of a revolutionary regime that defined itself through hostility to the United States and the wider West. Since then, the regime has made anti-Americanism, anti-Israel ideology, proxy warfare, terrorism, and revolutionary export part of its governing identity. This is not a side hobby. It is not a branding issue. It is foundational doctrine.
That is why I bristle when otherwise intelligent people speak of Iran as though it were some misunderstood actor suddenly cornered into conflict by forces beyond its control. Tehran has spent nearly half a century making very clear who it is, what it believes, and what it wants.
We should believe it.
And if we are being honest, we should also admit that many of America’s traditional allies are not what they once were. The Atlantic alliance that emerged from the rubble of 1945 was built by nations with stronger civic confidence, stronger military seriousness, and a clearer understanding of civilizational stakes. Much of that confidence has frayed. In its place, too often, we find hesitation, moral confusion, demographic anxiety, and political leadership more comfortable managing decline than confronting danger.
Part of that change comes from secular exhaustion. Part comes from elite drift. Part comes from the failure of leaders to integrate newcomers into a confident democratic culture rooted in the values that made Europe and the broader West worth preserving in the first place. And yes, part of the challenge comes from the growth of Islamist movements and the political timidity with which some Western leaders have responded to them. That does not mean Muslim citizens as a whole share Islamist aims. It does mean that some traditional allies have become less clear-eyed about defending their own civilizational inheritance.
Demography is not destiny, but denial is not strategy.
The issue is not that Europe has Muslim populations. The issue is whether Europe still possesses the confidence to integrate, defend, and preserve the civilizational norms that define it. Too often, its leaders have confused tolerance with surrender and pluralism with the abdication of cultural self-respect.
Which is precisely why Israel matters even more.
In a region and a world where too many old allies hesitate, equivocate, and moralize, Israel remains clear-eyed about threats, willing to act, and grounded in a seriousness too much of the West now treats as unfashionable.
There is another dimension here that Christians, in particular, should not ignore.
For Christians, Israel is not merely a foreign policy question. It is the land of the Bible, the setting of sacred history, the geography of revelation. It is where the Hebrew prophets walked, where Jesus lived and taught, where He was crucified, and where Christians believe the Resurrection changed history forever. To reduce Israel to a talking point in a strategic memo is to miss something much larger than politics.
That does not mean every policy of every Israeli government is above criticism. Democracies are not absolved from scrutiny by covenant, and faith should never require intellectual surrender. But it does mean that Christians should understand Israel as more than a headline. It is part of the spiritual inheritance of the West.
There is also a moral contrast that should not be ignored. Israel remains, for all its imperfections and internal debates, a place where Christian holy sites endure, where democratic life continues, and where faith is not crushed under the heel of an explicitly theocratic revolutionary state. For Jews, Israel is homeland. For Christians, it is sacred history. For America, it is strategic necessity. And for the West, it remains one of the few places where biblical memory, democratic life, and civilizational continuity still visibly meet.
It is also worth remembering that the U.S.-Israel relationship is not a one-way street. One of the great dishonesties in this debate is the pretense that America receives nothing from the alliance except entanglement and inconvenience.
That is nonsense.
America gains intelligence. America gains innovation. America gains operational insight. America gains a military partner with real capability. America gains joint advancements in missile defense, cybersecurity, medicine, agriculture, artificial intelligence, and national security systems. America gains a democratic ally that fights, bleeds, and delivers. America gains credibility.
And credibility, in international affairs, is not a decorative accessory. It is the currency by which alliances live or die.
A strong U.S.-Israel alliance tells friends that America stands by those who stand by it. It tells enemies that democratic partnerships are not easily fractured by propaganda, intimidation, or ideological fashion. It reinforces deterrence. It preserves influence. It strengthens American posture in a region that remains central to global security and economic stability whether the isolationists approve of geography or not.
Israel is not a burden on American power. Israel is one of the instruments through which American power, deterrence, and regional relevance are preserved.
That is not sentimentality. That is strategy.
Which brings us back to the strange coalition with which we began.
The far left says Israel is a colonial aggressor manipulating American imperialism. The hard right says America is sacrificing itself for foreign interests. The self-anointed center wraps the same suspicion in the language of prudence, distance, and Netanyahu’s agenda. Each believes he is saying something distinct. In truth, they are harmonizing beautifully.
It is a miserable choir.
And their convergence matters precisely because it normalizes what ought to remain disreputable. Once the accusation that Jews manipulated America into war migrates from the fringe into respectable discourse, it acquires a legitimacy it has not earned. It becomes easier for the uninformed to repeat, for the angry to weaponize, and for genuine antisemites to launder through polished language.
That is how poison travels in civilized society. Not always in crude form, but often through respectable hands.
What concerns me most is not that fools and bigots continue to say foolish and bigoted things. History has never suffered a shortage of either. What concerns me is the speed with which these ideas now circulate through spaces that imagine themselves serious. When ancient slanders are given modern presentation, they become more dangerous, not less. They make American Jews less safe. They distort public understanding. They weaken one of the most important alliances in the democratic world. And they hand every genuine antisemite in America a polished vocabulary with which to express old hatreds under the cover of policy disagreement.
That cannot go unanswered.
It must be answered with confidence, historical memory, and truth.
America and Israel are not puppeteer and puppet. They are partners. They share threats. They share values. They share technology. They share intelligence. They share burdens. And, when necessary, they share the hard moral clarity required to confront forces that would gladly dismantle the very order from which the West has long benefited.
I have spent enough years watching the region, working around its realities, and learning its harder lessons to know that serious people can disagree on policy, sequencing, tactics, leadership, and the use of force. Democracies should have those debates. Indeed, they must.
But the moment the debate collapses into the accusation that “the Jews dragged us into this,” the conversation is no longer strategic. It is cultural decay disguised as analysis.
The names change. The platforms multiply. The slogans modernize. The hashtags improve. The lie remains ancient.
So let us say plainly what ought never require whispering:
Israel is not America’s master.
Israel is America’s ally.
And a strong U.S.-Israel alliance is not merely good for Israel. It is indispensable to American interests, American security, American credibility, and the preservation of a world in which democracies still know how to stand together when it matters.
The old lie has returned in modern dress.
It should be answered the way it always should have been answered: clearly, firmly, and without apology.
Because some lies are too dangerous, too old, and too familiar to let pass in silence.