After the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket that left ten dead and three others injured, much attention has been paid to the perpetrator’s repugnant ideas about race and immigration. But, although the shooter deliberately sought to murder African Americans, his manifesto makes clear that he sees Jews as the sinister force behind the world’s evils. The commentator known by the pseudonym Elder of Ziyon, examining the 180-page document, notes the ways that it combines anti-Semitic ideas from both far-right and far-left sources—and that often it’s difficult to tell the difference:

His chapter on Jews in the first section . . . copies both text and graphics from far-right websites. However, there is a bit of cross-pollination between the far-left and the far-right in how they regard Jews. One can see that his sources [on the right] take materials from the far-left anti-Semites and that leftist anti-Semites take materials from the same far-right materials that he quotes. His document includes talking points taken directly from the “anti-Zionist” left. . . . He also takes talking points from the Nation of Islam.

Indeed, Elder to Ziyon points to a graphic, pasted into the manifesto, that contains all the standard accusations of “apartheid,” “illegal occupation,” and the like, next to a picture of Israel with a Jewish star on top of it.

Like the anti-Semitic left, [the shooter] argues that he doesn’t hate all Jews: “When referring to ‘the Jews’ I don’t mean all ethnic or religious Jews. Some can be actually decent, and make significant progress [sic] to humanity. However many of them are not.” Is there any difference between what he says and the anti-Semitic left saying that its obsessive hate of Israel has nothing to do with hating Jews, since they think there are “good Jews” as well?

The far left and the far right might say they hate Jews for different reasons, but neither of them have a problem with using the arguments and methods of the other side.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.