A David Frum response to Ro Khanna shows how hasbara culture has warped the Jewish community’s response to antisemitism

The article opens with an exchange in which Ro Khanna, after calling on the DNC to release its 2024 election autopsy and 'deal with the hard truths about the genocide in Gaza,' joked "You guys still around?" at AIPAC.

“When Ro Khanna joked, “You guys still around”

Mondoweiss

AIPAC quote-tweeted him: "@RoKhanna isn’t seeking facts — he’s seeking cover to repeat a modern blood libel."

Mondoweiss

David Frum then quote-tweeted Khanna and wrote: "A question that has been repeatedly asked in dozens of now forgotten languages over the past 3,000 years."

The author argues that Frum's move turns a political critique of a powerful lobby into a metaphysical charge of eternal Jew-hatred, collapsing AIPAC into "the Jews" and erasing the real political actors involved.

The piece diagnoses this as symptomatic of hasbara culture, which the author defines as starting from a fixed, dramatic idea of "the antisemite" and fitting incidents to that script rather than doing case-by-case analysis.

The article cites Shaul Magid’s warning that many new books and pundits repeat "one undifferentiated river of Jew-hatred, from medieval blood libels to Hamas to campus protests to anyone who uses the word 'genocide' about Gaza," rather than relying on scholars who study antisemitism and examine context, actors, and beliefs.

Mondoweiss

The author warns that this cultural shift has produced a "new priesthood of 'Never Again' journalists and organizations" that displace serious scholarship.

“When Ro Khanna joked, “You guys still around”

Mondoweiss

This collapse of distinctions between Nazis and mainstream critics treats figures such as Zohran Mamdani, Carter, Obama, and even genocide scholars as participants in campaigns against Jewish existence.

The article concludes by urging readers to insist on the difference between criticizing a lobby and hating Jews, between a Khanna and a Nazi, and between scholarship and hasbara dressed up as expertise.

It argues that failure to do so will empower "the very forces, and the very leaders, who have brought us to this disastrous moment."