When ISIS took over, I began secretly documenting their atrocities under the name Mosul Eye. I watched as my neighbors became enemies, as public spaces turned into execution grounds, and as fear seeped into every aspect of life.
Extremism didn’t arrive with guns and black flags. It first crept in as whispers in sermons, then as slogans, and eventually as checkpoints, arrests, and executions. By the time the world called it what it was—terrorism—it was too late.
But that’s how hate works. It doesn’t begin with violence; it starts with the normalization of dangerous ideas—ideas categorized by many as “opinions.” And we’re seeing that same pattern now in the United States.
But what happens when that “opinion” denies the humanity of an entire people? When it rewrites their history, questions their identity, or suggests they don’t have a right to exist? What happens when that opinion becomes a slogan, then a movement, and then a firebomb thrown at a synagogue?
In May, two Israeli diplomats were shot outside Washington, DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. Their attacker claimed he acted in solidarity with Gaza. A few weeks later, a Holocaust survivor sustained fatal injuries during a terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, when a man with Molotov cocktails attacked a peaceful march for Israeli hostages. In both cases, the suspects didn’t see themselves as extremists. They thought they were standing for something righteous.
And that’s the danger. Because the line between opinion and extremism is thinner than people want to admit. Antisemitism adapts; it speaks the language of justice, of culture, of protest. And when no one challenges it, it becomes accepted, and then eventually deadly.
