Peloni: America’s future will be determined by its ability to see thru the paper storm of antisemitism being built as a obscuring device behind which America’s dismantling is taking place, and as Victor Satya explains below, this is taking form in real time.
Globalize the Intifada, American-Style
Victor Satya | August 15, 2026
For nearly half a century, the radicals and jihadists of the Middle East have insisted that America is the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan, a hierarchy first formalized by Ayatollah Khomeini after the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. The labels were never meant as casual insults. They described a worldview in which America represented the corrupting civilizational power and Israel its smaller, poisonous accomplice.
The irony today is that a large and growing number of Americans have embraced half of that worldview with remarkable enthusiasm. They spend enormous energy debating the Little Satan while appearing curiously relaxed about the possibility that the Great Satan is being transformed from within.
Modern American politics has developed a near-religious obsession with Israel. AIPAC has become the universal explanatory device of public life. The Israeli lobby has been elevated from a lobbying organization into a supernatural force apparently capable of controlling the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street, Hollywood, the media, and perhaps the weather if given another funding cycle.
The public debate somehow always circles back to the same sacred question: How much of America is controlled by the Israeli lobby?
Not Chinese influence.
Not Iranian networks.
Not the ideological capture of universities.
Not the steady normalization of views that would have been considered openly anti-American twenty years ago.
The debate over U.S. aid to Israel has become especially revealing. Listening to many, one would think that military assistance to Israel is the principal reason American cities are struggling. Detroit is not suffering from deindustrialization, family breakdown, poor governance, or decades of policy failure. No, the problem is Iron Dome. Chicago is not dealing with crime, corruption, and fiscal dysfunction. The problem is precision-guided munitions for Israel. Los Angeles is not drowning in its own political decisions. The real scandal, we are told, is that America helped the only democracy in the Middle East shoot down the missiles aimed at it.
Then comes the familiar accusation that Israel drags America into wars.
The recent U.S.-Israel confrontation with Iran has been folded neatly into this narrative. According to the new orthodoxy, America was minding its own business when Israel manipulated it into conflict. Iran’s decades of proxy warfare, attacks on American personnel, sponsorship of terrorism, pursuit of nuclear capabilities, and open calls for the destruction of both Israel and the United States somehow become secondary details. The central moral drama is that Israel exercised influence.
When Iran funds militias across the Middle East, that is regional complexity. When Israel asks for support against those militias, that is undue influence. When jihadist movements openly threaten America, that is a matter for nuanced analysis. When Israel fights those movements, that is evidence of dangerous control.
The Little Satan is accused of dragging the Great Satan into wars against the very forces that routinely call America the Great Satan.
While this national psychodrama unfolds, a quieter transformation has been taking place inside the United States. The number of Muslim elected officials has risen dramatically over the past decade. State legislatures from Maine to Texas now include dozens of Muslim members. Major cities have elected Muslim council members and mayors. Progressive coalitions increasingly treat Islamist-aligned activism as a protected component of multicultural politics.
This is not a conspiracy; it is a political reality. What is striking is the asymmetry of concern. A Jewish donor attending a fundraiser is treated as a potential threat to democracy. A politician refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada” is treated as a voice that must not be silenced.
The legal and cultural dimensions are equally important. Courts have repeatedly been asked to recognize Islamic family-law arrangements and arbitration agreements under existing legal frameworks. Universities host activists who openly reject core assumptions of Western liberalism. Progressive movements increasingly fuse anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, anti-capitalism, and identity politics into a single moral language in which Israel becomes the symbol of everything supposedly wrong with modern civilization.
The contrast with Israel could hardly be sharper. Israel is not spending its national energy wondering whether Hamas has legitimate grievances that were insufficiently platformed. It is not organizing campus encampments for Hezbollah. It is not asking whether eliminating the people trying to murder its citizens might be emotionally exclusionary. It identifies enemies and acts against them.
Hamas has been devastated. Hezbollah has been severely battered. Iranian military and nuclear targets have been struck repeatedly. One may debate tactics, costs, and consequences, but Israel still behaves like a country that intends to survive.
America increasingly behaves like a civilization that interrogates its own right to endure with greater intensity than it interrogates those who would happily see it transformed.
The most revealing feature of this moment is not that anti-Israel sentiment has grown. Democracies can survive criticism of allies. The revealing feature is that a substantial portion of the American public seems more alarmed by the influence of a pro-Israel lobby than by the rise of movements and political actors who openly challenge America’s foundational norms.
Americans never imagined what taking over the West would look like; they did not imagine it might look like universities teaching students to despise their own civilization, politicians treating intifada slogans as acceptable discourse, legal accommodations accumulating without serious public debate, and activists devoting more energy to investigating Jewish influence than to examining movements that openly reject the principles of liberal democracy.
So the inversion becomes complete.
The Great Satan spends its time debating whether the Little Satan controls America through AIPAC, campaign donations, and foreign-policy influence. The Little Satan spends its time fighting organizations that openly seek the destruction of both Israel and the United States. And while Americans remain absorbed by the question of whether Israel is taking over their country, political, demographic, cultural, and ideological changes continue to reshape that country in real time.
One society still knows who its enemies are.
The other is busy arguing about whether identifying enemies is itself a form of extremism.
The most revealing feature of this moment is not that Americans disagree about Israel. It is that so many appear capable of detecting the alleged influence of a Jewish lobby in every corner of public life while remaining almost studiously incurious about the growth of movements that openly reject the moral and civilizational assumptions on which the United States was built. A society that spends more time interrogating the loyalty of its allies than the intentions of its adversaries is not displaying sophistication; it is displaying confusion.
And confusion about who wishes to preserve your civilization and who wishes to transform it is rarely a harmless intellectual error. So before concluding that Israel is taking over America, Americans might ask themselves a harder question: which force is actually asking the country to become less recognizably American, and why has naming that force become more controversial than resisting it?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.