Last week, the Daily Wire, a popular rightwing website, fired the provocateur and YouTuber Candace Owens after she liked a social-media post describing a rabbi as “drunk on Christian blood.” Her firing is no doubt the result of her yearslong descent into anti-Semitism, which has been accompanied by her endorsing of outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines, Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky, and the like. Christine Rosen examines Owens’s all-too-common method of pushing anti-Semitism into the public sphere: insinuation, prevarication, retreat to the position that she is “just asking questions” that others are afraid to, and claim she is being “cancelled,” before she begins the cycle again.

When she is criticized for saying something irresponsible, or factually incorrect, or anti-Semitic, Owens immediately plays the victim and claims persecution as a Christian or an African American.

Owens has not been libeled or smeared; she’s been properly criticized for spreading hateful views. And she’s hardly a victim. She has 4 million followers on Instagram, 4.8 million on X, and many, many viewers for her Daily Wire show.

The Trump era has created a conundrum on the right. While support for Israel and a general philo-Semitism remain enduring features of the right in the U.S., some of the loudest voices in right-leaning new media now oppose Israel and are leaning into outright anti-Semitism. They take the understandable belief that mainstream culture and media are hostile to Christianity and traditional conservative values and twist it into a new iteration of classic Christian anti-Semitism—all while claiming to be among the victimized.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.