On Sunday night, a carefully edited clip from the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly detonated across social media and reached more than eight million views in under twenty-four hours. The speaker was Sarah Hurwitz, former head speechwriter for President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.

The clip, posted by Chris Menahan and amplified by accounts across the political spectrum, showed Hurwitz telling a room of Jewish donors that Holocaust education has “backfired” because young people now watch endless videos of “carnage in Gaza” on TikTok and instinctively side with Palestinians as the new victims of oppression.

By Tuesday morning the video was the number one trending topic on X, spawned sixty-three thousand posts, and became the latest weapon in a coordinated information operation designed to mainstream antisemitism under the guise of human rights activism.

This was not an accident. This was a textbook manipulation campaign, and every element was deliberate, including amplification.

First, the framing. The clip was trimmed to begin with Hurwitz saying young people are “having their brains smashed all day long” with Gaza footage from Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes. That juxtaposition alone is psychological genius: it forces Jewish viewers to defend the indefensible equivalence while giving anti-Israel activists a soundbite that appears to admit the Holocaust is now being “weaponized” to justify Palestinian suffering. The audience hears a confession; the algorithm hears rocket fuel.

Second, the distribution network. Within hours the clip was pushed by verified blue-check accounts with millions of followers, translated into Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish, and seeded into TikTok’s For You page through duet chains and stitch videos. Hashtag clusters such as #HolocaustBackfire, #GazaCarnage, and #ZionistTears were pre-positioned days earlier, a tactic known as hashtag priming. By the time most people saw the video, the narrative was already locked: even Obama’s Jewish speechwriter now admits Israel has become the new Third Reich.

holocaust education is too succesful, it made the kids anti holocaust while israel is trying to do one. Hasan Piker

Third, the emotional hijacking. Notice what Hurwitz never says: that much of the “carnage” footage is staged, recycled, or deliberately decontextualized by Hamas-run ministries and Qatari-funded networks. She never mentions the October 7 massacre, the use of human shields, or the fact that the same TikTok algorithm buries any content showing Israeli victims.

Instead, she concedes the central premise of the propaganda campaign: the visuals are so powerful that facts no longer matter. That concession is the permission structure the radicalizers need. When a respected Jewish voice says the images are authentic and overwhelming, the conclusion writes itself: Israel is guilty, and anyone defending Israel is complicit in genocide.

This is the same playbook that catapulted New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani into a social media star and darling of the campus left. In 2021 and 2022, Mamdani’s TikTok account exploded from a few thousand followers to hundreds of thousands in weeks.

How? Identical tactics. Short, looping clips of him calling Israel an “apartheid state” were stitched with emotional Gaza footage, set to trending Palestinian music, and boosted by the same network of influencers who now amplify Hurwitz’s remarks. Hashtags were primed (#FreePalestine, #ApartheidIsrael), duets were coordinated, and every criticism of Mamdani was flooded with accusations of Islamophobia until the algorithm itself punished dissent. Columbia and NYU students began wearing “Zohran was right” shirts before most of them could spell his name. The manipulation was so effective that corporate media outlets began treating a first-term DSA legislator as the authentic voice of Palestinian Americans.

The tools are identical because the operators are sophisticated and well-funded. Economic incentives and funding from state actors in Qatar, Iran, and even Russia understand that TikTok’s algorithm rewards high emotional valence above all else. They can use their bot farms to get you virility and the same entities to send you money, and with networks paying you for views, and international audience. Ian Carrol was a DoorDash driver with no followers till he started making clips from Kremlins Whitney Webbs books.

Obu Obieda, Hamas spokesperson, had 1500 people on his content and marketing team. Just take any video, recent or from Syria 9 years ago, with sad music plus crying children, plus an authoritative voice, equals maximum watch time and maximum shares. Once the video crosses a certain velocity threshold, the platform itself becomes the distributor, pushing it to millions of teenagers who have never heard of the Oslo Accords but now believe Jews are committing a second Holocaust in real time.

What makes the Hurwitz moment especially dangerous is the source. When the accusation comes from fringe accounts, it can be dismissed. When it comes from a former senior Obama official speaking to the most important Jewish fundraising conference in America, it carries an entirely different weight. The clip will be cited for years as proof that “even Jews” admit the moral equivalence. That is the endgame of the operation: to make antisemitism respectable again by laundering it through Jewish voices who believe they are engaging in self-criticism.

The pushback, as always, is anemic. A handful of organizations issued statements pointing out the selective editing and lack of context, but those posts reached fewer than one percent of the audience that saw the original clip. The algorithmic battlefield is asymmetrical by design. Outrage travels at the speed of light; clarification crawls, and over two year, the response has been nonexistent.

America is now living through the most sophisticated influence campaign against a domestic minority since the radio broadcasts of the 1930s. The targets this time are not adults who read newspapers; they are fifteen-year-olds who get their history from fifteen-second loops. And the payload is not mere criticism of Israeli policy. It is the deliberate construction of a moral hierarchy in which Jewish self-defense is inherently suspect and eventually criminal.

There are not that many people who even understand all these methods. Unless Jewish organizations and pro-Israel voices unite, and get the right people and resources and master these same tools, and master them quickly, the next generation will grow up believing that the world’s oldest hatred has finally found its righteous justification.

The Hurwitz video is not an isolated embarrassment, it's just a very effective one, and will be used over nd over to vilify the Jewish community. It is a warning shot in a war that is already well underway, and so far, only one side is fighting with modern weapons. Please join me to stop them.

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