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The far-right has found in its pretend fight against antisemitism a way to divide progressives while at the same time clobbering them

The detention of Columbia university student, Mahmoud Khalil, is unequivocally chilling. Khalil, who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia university last year, was targeted for his politics. His unlawful arrest by the US immigration enforcement agency comes amidst relentless smears lobbed at protesters of Israel’s war on Gaza. This McCarthyite abduction of a Palestinian Green Card holder is a trial balloon, a test of what society might tolerate and a threat of more to come. And the added horror-show twist to this assault on free speech is that it is being done in the name of Jewish people under the pretence of tackling antisemitism.

Such egregious claims are easily refuted. Most American Jews didn’t vote for Trump and don’t back his crackdowns. As Amy Spitalnik of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, one of multiple Jewish groups opposing Khalili’s detention, said: “The Trump administration is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to undercut democracy.” Meanwhile, it is grotesque to pretend that Team Trump, home to antisemitic conspiracy theories, Nazi salutes and Holocaust denialism, is fighting antisemitism, rather than actively reproducing it.

Rachel Shabi is the author of Not the Enemy – Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands and Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism

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Seeing falsehoods everywhere is as damaging as believing too much. Our focus should be on helping people interpret information better

On 30 October 1938, a US radio station broadcast a dramatisation of HG Wells’s apocalyptic novel The War of the Worlds. Some listeners, so we’re told, failed to realise what they had tuned into; reports soon emerged of panicked audiences who had mistaken it for a news bulletin. A subsequent academic study estimated that more than a million people believed they were experiencing an actual Martian invasion.

A startling example of how easily misinformation can take hold, perhaps. But the story is not all it appears to be. Despite oft-repeated claims, the mass panic almost certainly didn’t happen. In national radio audience surveys, only 2% reported listening to anything resembling The War of the Worlds at the time of the broadcast. Those who did seemed to be aware that it was fiction. Many referred to “the play” or its narrator Orson Welles, with no mention of a news broadcast. It turned out that the academic analysis had misinterpreted listener accounts of being frightened by the drama as panic about a real-life invasion.

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